Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600

Conclusion: Empirical Values in a Transitional Age

Conclusion: Empirical Values in a Transitional Age | 127 conc lusion Empirical Values in a Transitional Age This book has focused on the thesis that artisans influenced the methodology of the new sciences that developed from the mid-sixteenth century. Marxist scholars such as Hessen, Borkenau, Grossmann, and Zilsel, as well as non-Marxists such as Robert Merton, argued that artisans, or modes of production, or machines used by artisans exerted such influence. The opponents of the thesis, some of them influential figures in the early history of science such as Koyré and A. R. Hall, articulated their opposition in terms of their belief that science was a theoretical enterprise that progressed by advances in theory untouched by the surrounding context. Often left unspoken was the anti-Marxism that also influenced their positions. Both those who argued for artisanal influence on the new sciences and their opponents accepted without question the rigorously separate categoriesof“craftsman”and“scholar”thatdividedmakersfromthinkers, and in this acceptance both sides joined a long tradition. An important source was Aristotle and Aristotelian traditions that distinguished between epistemē (theoretical knowledge of the unchanging); praxis (knowledge of contingent things requiring judgment); and technē (making and thinking about making things). From the time of Aristotle, such categories were hierarchically ranked: epistemē was at the highest level and technē at the lowest. In the medieval period, the liberal arts—the trivium (rhetoric, grammar, and logic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy)—were considered separate from and superior to the lower mechanical arts.1 This separation was reinforced in the medieval period by the circumstance that by virtue of background, 128 | Conclusion: Empirical Values in a Transitional Age training, social status, languages used, and place of work, artisans and learned people lived and worked in quite separate arenas. This book has shown that through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries practitioners acquired humanist learning and universityeducated humanists acquired skill. The two categories overlapped, and the distinction became blurred in certain spheres and arenas. This blurring of two separate realms did not occur universally through all ranks of society, nor did it change the hierarchical social and political structure of that society. Shoemakers and university professors still lived and worked worlds apart in the late sixteenth century, as they had in the twelfth. The spheres of overlap and interchange between the skilled and the learned did not occur everywhere, but the “trading zones” where they did occur were many and often were situated close to elite individuals and the essential interests of powerful rulers and states. This proximity to centers of power meant that the empirical values promoted in these trading zones gained general currency. In addition, in the two centuries that are the focus of this book, these powerful rulers, princes, and oligarchs caused the built landscape to be visibly transformed with magnificent palaces, churches, public buildings, and redesigned cities. Elites were increasingly surrounded by luxurious goods, ornaments including painting and sculpture in the new style, and lavish apparel. Trading zones framed many of the activities that brought about these changes. As a result, the empirical values characteristic of artisanal culture came to be disseminated widely, making them more readily available as methodological resources for the investigation of the natural world. My conclusions concerning the development of trading zones are consonant with the interpretive framework of a recent collection of studies, The Mindful Hand, in which two of the editors, Lissa Roberts and Simon Schaffer, suggest that employing dichotomous categories such as handwork/intellectual work, craftsman/scholar, and theory/practice distorts the complicated mix of “knowledge, know-how, and technique” (xvii) that characterized early modern European investigations of the natural world.2 Studies in the volume pertaining to the late sixteenth Conclusion: Empirical Values in a Transitional Age | 129 and seventeenth centuries indeed show in rich detail the complex interrelationships of practical, technical, intellectual, and theoretical practices as they pertain to comets and cannonballs, goldsmithing, and seventeenth-century dioptrics.3 What I argue is that these close, complex interrelationships were characteristic of the historical period of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Far from being ubiquitous through all time (as Roberts and Schaffer seem to suggest), they are the result of the specific historical developments described here. By the late sixteenth century, a sharp category distinction between the “scholar” and the “craftsman,” the separation of “theory” and “practice,” and the distinct categories of “art” and “nature” became anachronistic within certain contexts...