Research Seminar - Department of Art History and Cultural Practices, University of Manchester
Artisan Epistemologies, Material Imaginaries: Insights from the Making and Knowing Project
Pamela Smith, Seth Low Professor of History, Columbia University, USA
Abstract
Over the course of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, artists and artisans increasingly produced writings about their practice. An intriguing late sixteenth-century anonymous manuscript, Ms. Fr. 640 (now held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France), collects together over 900 “recipes" for objects of art, technology, and everyday use. In 2020, the Making and Knowing Project released Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France, an open-access digital edition and English translation of this manuscript. The technical and artistic instructions contained in Ms. Fr. 640 provide opportunities to explore the meanings and conceptualization of making and materials in early modern Europe, and shed light on the embodied knowledge of handworkers, showing how the work of making was (and is) a form of knowing. This lecture will review results from the Making and Knowing Project's research and teaching in the lab, classroom and the field over the last decade.
Biography
Pamela H. Smith, Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University, is founding Director of the Center for Science and Society and its cluster project the Making and Knowing Project (www.makingandknowing.org [makingandknowing.org]). Her books, including The Business of Alchemy (1994), The Body of the Artisan (2004), and From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World (2022), investigate craft and practice as a way of knowing. She has collaborated on edited volumes that treat the history of practice, embodied knowledge, and material culture. She led the Making and Knowing Project’s multiyear creation of Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France [edition640.makingandknowing.org] (2020), and is now working on longue durée histories of socio-natural sites of pre-industrial industry.