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

Notes

132 | Notes to Introduction Notes Introduction 1 Thus I use the expression “artisan/practitioners” in a general way to include all skilled workers and practitioners who learned through formal or informal apprenticeships and oral instruction. Although this includes a vast array of diverse skills and disciplines, it points perhaps to a common culture that values handwork and hands-on skill and the practices that accompany them. This is not to suggest that all types of artisan/practitioners exerted influence equally. On the level of particular disciplines or crafts, some practitioners, such as architect/engineers or navigators, as a group, were much more influential than, say, shoemakers or bakers. The influence of artisanal culture as a whole and the influence of particular groups are both important. To complicate matters, as I suggest in this book, the distinctions and separations between certain groups of “artisan/practitioners” and learned men lessened considerably or sometimes disappeared during the two centuries treated here. 2 For a comprehensive introduction to numerous facets of this development, see Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston, eds., The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3: Early Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Shorter synthetic introductions include Peter Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500–1700 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); John Henry, The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science, 3d ed. (Basingstoke, Eng.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); and Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). For a comprehensive historiographic treatment, see H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); and I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985). 3 For a succinct, cogent discussion of the medieval universities and the pedagogical techniques employed therein, see Edward Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional, and Intellectual Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 33–53. 4 A foundational study is Charles B. Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983). For Aristotelianism in the medieval universities, see Grant, Foundations of Modern Science, 33–53, and see Paul F. Grendler, The Universities of the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). See also Ann Blair, “Natural Philosophy,” in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3: Early Modern Science, ed. Park and Daston, 365–406, esp. 372–379, which emphasizes innovations in Aristotelian natural philosophy during the Renaissance. 5 Although focusing on one city, Richard A. Goldthwaite, The Economy of Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), serves as a comprehensive introduction. For the background, see the classic Robert Notes to Introduction | 133 S. Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950–1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), and a recent synthesis, Steven A. Epstein, An Economic and Social History of Later Medieval Europe, 1000–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). See also S. R. Epstein, Freedom and Growth: The Rise of States and Markets in Europe, 1300–1750 (New York: Routledge, 2000); and another classic, Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, trans. Siân Reynolds, 3 vols. (New York: Harper and Row, 1981). 6 See esp. Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006); Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007); and Marìa M. Portuondo, Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 7 See the classic Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983). In the history of science, a groundbreaking work on the European courts was Mario Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 8 See esp. Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994); Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and CulturalTransformations in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); and Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 9 See Patricia Fortini Brown, Private Lives in Renaissance Venice: Art, Architecture, and the Family (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004); and Richard A. Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance...