Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe (review)

Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Pp. ix+437. $90/$27.95.

In Merchants and Marvels Pamela Smith and Paula Findlen bring together fifteen essays dedicated to the world of commerce, science, and art in early modern Europe. These essays, bracketed by an introduction and two epilogues, are teeming with practitioners of science and their patrons. The multiplicity of their projects, creations, and claims, as well as the very heterogeneity and discontinuities of this volume, call to mind the atmosphere of a busy marketplace, a noisy and unpredictable alternative to any narrative of scientific progress. Here we meet known and unknown figures, competing across Europe and the Atlantic to make and sell images and samples of nature that convey some of the knowledge they see in it. They were not only the neighbors but also the indispensable acolytes of the writers and thinkers we have more readily noticed. They all "trafficked in nature" (p. 301), and this book asserts the primacy of the imperative of exchange that underwrote their daily labors, shaping the social, economic, and cultural geography of early science.

The book's first section revolves around the scientific implications of a range of representations of nature. Albrecht Dürer and many others saw in nature an unlimited source of knowledge, a wellspring of concerns that resonated widely with their contemporaries. Their representations or manipulations of natural objects challenged earlier, literate traditions of knowledge. They contributed to a growing appreciation of the value of observation, facilitated reflections on order and classification, and multiplied opportunities for the confrontation of competing claims. There is no doubt that sharp minds have always been stimulated by the spectacle of nature. This era witnessed the diffusion of these questions to widening circles through new depictions of nature.

These challenges and the fresh inquiries they triggered were not randomly distributed, however. The second section of this book surveys some of the networks, shaped by interest and power, around which they grew. Commerce served a vast range of ambitions, and the loftiest philosophical stance could cohabit with very pragmatic goals. Dynamic investigators or speculators navigated across what remained porous borders between distinct, even competing groups. Historians may be tempted to overstate the logic characteristic of each circle, if only as a guiding thread to their investigations. However, these essays make clear that at any given time knowledge was anchored in a combination of such settings, a hybrid foundation that is too easily overlooked.

The last section suggests that the myriad inquiries of this dynamic age may be organized around the principle of consumption, the use of the senses to know and enjoy nature. Planting the roots of modern science in the turbulent field of human passions may not reassure those unnerved by this kaleidoscopic image of early modern science, but it will convey some of the vitality and the diversity of the motivations at work in this great adventure.

The two concluding contributions go a little further. One remarks that the diversity sketched by these essays stands in opposition to the search for unity and order traditionally at the center of histories of science. Focusing on the practice of science bares the fundamental importance of this dichotomy to our conceptions of knowledge. A second epilogue recalls that if a focus on representations profitably multiplies the possible perspectives on the origins of science, it also invites further reflections on the changing epistemic value of images and other forms of art. Because the relations between nature and its representations are never fixed, such sources demand a highly historicized treatment.

A less open-ended assessment of this collection of essays would betray the intentions of the authors and editors, which fit well within current decentered and highly contextualized approaches to the history of science and, indeed, technology. Yet effectively placing science in...