The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialisation (review)

Pity the reviewer of collected proceedings essays. Rather than attempting to convey and critique the intentions and efforts of one or two authors, she or he must confront a dozen or more, often of wide-ranging quality and only loosely connected by a conference theme. But this volume is different, and readers of Technology and Culture should take note. The fifteen case studies, helped along by seven substantial introductory and reflective essays, constitute a scholarly effort of some importance, with unusual coherence of theme and consistency in quality.

At first glance, the effort here might seem unpromising, tackling as it does one of the most timeworn subjects in our field: the relations between science and technology. But again we are surprised, as the editors are at pains to point out that this formulation of the history of “inquiry and invention” is based on a dichotomy that simply does not work for the crucial period under discussion, from the sixteenth century to the first years of the nineteenth. Not only are the categories of “science” and “technology” themselves problematic until much later in the nineteenth century, but the thought and work that engaged natural philosophers, craftsmen, instrument makers, mathematicians, and entrepreneur-engineers were often so intermingled in both intention and execution that all our categories for the period call for re-examination.

The close ties between knowledge(s) and technique(s) are emphasized at every turn, and the case studies are carefully calibrated to build strong evidence for making these ties and relations central to our understanding of a period that shaped modernity. Indeed, the images of “mindful hands” and “handy minds” displace, at least in many of the cases described here, the philosophers and craftsmen who once seemed to provide comfortable categories for projecting our own notions of science and technology back into the past.

Space does not permit a comprehensive summary of these case studies, but a few examples can represent the high quality of the whole. Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis’s essay on dioptrics—the study of light and its behavior in lenses—neatly uses the engagement of such philosophical giants as Christiaan Huygens and René Descartes not only in the understanding of lenses but in the improvement of their manufacture and use as a vehicle for obliterating the philosophy-craft distinction. In a manner representative of a number of the essays, the categories of “mathé maticien” and “géomètre” are highlighted to illustrate the social as well as intellectual planes on which entanglement of hand and mind can be observed.

Jim Bennett’s wonderful discussion of how an instrument—the air gun—became a central player in both a legal drama and in a trivial and yet revealing episode in experimental philosophy is a model of how the historian can use an unexpected source—in this case, the court records of a trial for treason—to shed light on how instruments were designed, built, and modified in the workaday world of the late eighteenth century. The air gun, a familiar mechanism for producing and studying compressed air, could be transformed into a “popgun” (like a modern air rifle) and thus a deadly weapon in the hands of would-be regicides. By following the paths (literally —the author takes us on a walk through the streets of London) of the players of this drama as they went from instrument maker to instrument maker, Bennett gives us a surprising (and, it must be said, entertaining) look at how mechanisms were conceptualized and modified in real workshops.

The Mindful Hand is filled with high-quality contributions of this sort: Pamela Smith takes us into a sixteenth-century goldsmith’s workshop, Eric Ash shows us how “projectors” designed the drainage of the English fens, and Chandra Mukerji provides her contrasting picture of the state’s role in the planning and construction of France’s Canal du Midi. “Geographies of skill” are...