Abstracts Archive

The arrival of electricity as an everyday scientific and technological phenomenon into colonial Calcutta from the late-1870s onwards coincided with the emergence of the Bengali theatre as a physical and metaphorical stage to publicly portray, discuss and debate the contemporary social, cultural and ...

This paper addresses questions about the current shape of the humanities raised through two experimental jewelry arts workshops held at a vocational school in the Canadian Arctic. These workshops investigated the idea of an artisanal epistemology in early modern enquiries into the natural world in r...

This paper examines human and animal bodies that were painstakingly assembled and programmed by clockmakers during the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries in the German-speaking world. Known today as automata, these self-propelled mechanical objects have long been seen by scholars as exemplary of th...

Midwifery provides a critical lens into the influence of women serving in medical capacities in early modern Europe, but this unique position has not been sufficiently explored with regard to Jewish communities. This paper examines the Yiddish translation of a Dutch treatise on reproduction and chil...

In the early 20th century, Germany's first garden city Hellerau rose to fame as a prime example for an efficient and modern, yet worker-friendly life environment. Thanks to its school for somatic education and performances at the Festspielhaus, Hellerau became a center of the European avant-garde. A...

For mid nineteenth century scientists of language, orthography was important. Spelling was a conduit of fact. The ability to render spoken sounds into written symbols was essential to understanding what was roundly understood as the “evolution” of language — the supposedly law-like progression...

The idea of “object stories” has gained prominence in the museum world. It is thus important not only to explore its potential and applicability to HSTM museums, but also to discuss its relevance to curators, archivists, and historians of science working in other collections-based settings. Whil...

Theater and science have been, and continue to be, entangled. It is telling, for example, that the most produced playwright in the USA during the 2017-2018 season was Lauren Gunderson, who specializes in plays based on narratives from the history of science. We, as historians, also engage with ...

Was Vincenzo Galilei—composer, lutanist, and father of Galileo—an experimental scientist? Historians of science and music alike have agonized over this question. In 1589, Vincenzo recounted observations, taken from sonorous objects including lute strings and organ pipes, that seemed to contradic...

In recent years, historians of both science and the arts have recognized the vital role of craft knowledge and artisanal practice in the development of the premodern sciences. Nevertheless, unraveling the complex relationships between speculative/intellectual and practical/artisanal traditions in th...

Over the last several years, scholars have increasingly attended to the role of craft knowledge and artisanal practices in early modern Europe. These studies have investigated the importance of hands-on experience for ways of knowing about the world and pointed to the significance of artisanal pract...

Abstract: My method of drawing tangents, René Descartes told Marin Mersenne, “is the most noble way of demonstrating that can be, namely, that called a priori.” Descartes turned to scholastic terminology to describe his new mathematics; yet its practice involved compound compasses and scratched...

This paper considers a group of early modern scholars who combined philological and experimental practices in their investigation of ancient systems of measurement units. Inspired by the groundbreaking work of Guillaume Budé ("De asse," 1514), several humanists in the tradition of the treatises “...

This session explores quantification, measurement, accuracy, and precision at the intersection of scientific and humanistic disciplines. Past historiography has tended to associate this cluster of notions with the natural sciences. We suggest that, historically, several humanistic disciplines shared...

The idea of “object stories” has gained prominence in the museum world. It is thus important not only to explore its potential and applicability to HSTM museums, but also to discuss its relevance to curators, archivists, and historians of science working in other collections-based settings. Whi...

My talk will explore the interdependence of exactitude in scholarly as well as scientific contexts in nineteenth-century Prussia. Focusing on the influential historiographic work of August Boeckh (1785-1867) on ancient metrology I will sound out the different notions of accuracy, exactitude and prec...

The play “Watts” in a Home, written by Britain’s Electrical Association for Women (EAW) and first performed in 1930, stages a history of domestic electrical lighting in Britain between 1880 and 1930. The play bears similarities to other triumphalist “electrical propaganda” produced in a ra...

Prosthetic hands in early modern Europe were singular objects of artifice designed to supplement the natural body.  With moveable fingers and flesh-toned paint, they incorporated practical and aesthetic functions in ways impossible for other kinds of prostheses.  After all, silver noses could not ...

August Boeckh (1785-1867) is still esteemed for a publication that appears to be a comprehensive handbook of all weights and measures of antiquity. In succinct numerical prose, he demonstrates the interrelatedness of all metrological systems of the Mediterranean world up to the sixth century. But th...

The question of the periodization of early science is connoted with political concerns: whether Pierre Duhem's "discovery" of Medieval Science in the context of radical Catholicism in early twentieth century France; Herbert Butterfield’s cold war notion of the scientific Revolution as surpassing a...

This paper explores the relationship between Goethe's theater praxis and his early experiments on light and color throughout the 1790s. The paper first describes the inception of each endeavor: (1) Goethe's debut as stage director of Weimar's court theater on May 7, 1791-  a role that would las...

After the “rediscovery” of the Roman catacombs in 1578, the Catholic Church began exporting the relics of early Christian martyrs across Europe and beyond.  Between 1578 and 1803, the duchy of Bavaria received almost 400 of these “catacomb saints,” whose sparkling bodies still rest on altar...

Johann Beckmann (1739-1811), Professor of Oekonomie at the University of Göttingen, is often hailed as the founder of modern technology studies. But what can be said about Beckmann as an antiquarian? In this paper, I will discuss Beckmann’s longstanding interest in precious metals and his efforts...