Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge A five-day conference, to be held at several collaborating institutions in London, 11-15 July 2005. Conference organizers are Pamela Smith (Pomona College); Amy Meyers (YaleCenter for British Art); and Hal Cook (Wellcome Trust Centre); with partners at several London institutions. Intellectual Merits The aims of this conference are to build on exciting new work in the history of material culture: 1) to continue to break down the common historiographical dichotomies between craftskill and scientific knowledge (otherwise given the label .practice and theory. and other suchphrases), and 2) to showcase some of the most suggestive new work demonstrating that natural knowledge flowed from an engagement with natural things, from artisanal practice to scientific analysis. The goals of the conference will be accomplished by bringing together historians of science and medicine, art historians, and museum scholars to learn more from one another through a program that mixes lectures with hands-on demonstrations. The Problem: From 1450 to the nineteenth century, many changes occurred in the ways in which knowledge of nature was obtained. New methods of study and new groups of knowers entered the discussions about natural knowledge. Until the end of the fifteenth century, natural knowledge was mainly the preserve of scholars trained in the texts of the ancients, of medicalpractitioners, and of artisans who produced objects; these groups tended not to engage with one another, but considered their own kinds of knowledge sufficient. This division began to breakdown in the Renaissance as artisans proclaimed themselves artist-geniuses and their patrons began to see a direct connection between artisanal productive abilities and expertise in natural knowledge; at the same time, especially in medicine, university curators began to urge learned professors toward making their knowledge useful. The emergence of the experimental philosophy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries further broke down the distinction between artisanal and scholarly knowledge. Experts in the knowledge of nature largely incorporated into their own epistemology the empirical and artisanal view that knowing came from making and practicing: that working with natural things, whether by fabricating objects or by using nature's own products yielded true knowledge of the natural world. This new pursuit came to be called.experimental. philosophy and would eventually come to be called .natural science..Yet, for various reasons that were partially epistemological and partially sociological, many of the experimental philosophers continued to draw a distinction between theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge. The view that craftspeople more or less mindlessly followed a collection of recipes or rules was taken over by historians of science who then assigned only a minor role to artisans in the production of knowledge about nature. Recent investigation into the workshop practices of artisans belies such a view of craft knowledge. A more intensive examination of workshop practices has made it clear that the methods of theartisan were neither rote nor fortuitous, but arose from conscious experimentation and artisanal theorizing. Such investigation has begun to delineate a vernacular epistemology and a vernacular.science. of matter. This vernacular understanding of matter appears to be informed by popularmedical and religious knowledge and practices.The first aim of the conference is thus to examine the ways in which crafts people and others involved in the production of material things from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuryconceived of their own knowledge and how they employed that knowledge in working with natural things. Broader Impacts. The conference will not only include scholarly presentations but also hands-on demonstrations of craft skills and apprenticeship for participants. Through presentations and demonstrations at the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and other popular venues, the project will reach large and diverse audiences. The PI also plans to organize walking tours and to distribute pamphlets as a means to engage the public in this project.
