“Infrastructure of Not-Counting”

Michelle Murphy

Roundtable: Thematic Fields and Rethinking the Canon for Early Modern Science

“Early Modern Science as a Visual Pursuit: Where are the Maps?”

Surekha Davies (Western Connecticut State University)

Historians of science and of art have increasingly drawn from one another other in pursuit of new sources and methods with which to think about science as a visual pursuit. Some have turned their questions to the map. Where they have examined the epistemic quality of maps, they have largely focused on maps as purveyors of topography, or on the physical features of geographical space. Yet, maps remain to be incorporated into broader conversations about epistemic images and the culture of the diagram. For example, the epistemic work done by images on maps, rather than by maps as images, has received little attention. In a 2015 review essay in Renaissance Quarterly, Alexander Marr explored several questions that animate work at the intersection of art and science. But understanding epistemic images and examining the intersection of the traditional histories of art and science are not the same thing. Illustrations on maps have played only a very limited part in the disciplinary – perhaps one might even say disciplined – fields of early modern science and history of art. The epistemic significance of these images has gone almost unnoticed. This presentation asks how narratives on the visual cultures of early modern science might be reconceived in order to pay attention to the epistemic significance of maps.

“The Scientific Revolution: The Iberian Question”

Hugh Cagle (University of Utah)

In recent years, history of science has begun to acknowledge the importance of practices, disciplines, and participants beyond the mathematical spheres in the making of new knowledge. Many scholars have been uncovering early modern botany, natural history, artisans, women, and physicians, and are investigating the ways in which empire, expansion, and colonization made new spheres of empiricism and collecting possible. The turn to the Atlantic in the historiography of the Scientific Revolution, however, has yet to absorb the revolutionary implications of Iberian overseas expansion. In the historical profession more broadly, the Atlantic turn has highlighted the importance of the trans-imperial and transnational circulation of peoples, objects, and ideas. Yet narratives of the Scientific Revolution still remain predominantly northern European or national in scope. How can the turn to the transnational and global help us change the heuristic uses of the category of the Scientific Revolution?

“Indigenous Studies: It’s Not About the West and the Rest”

Marcy Norton (George Washington University)

This presentation proposes that the scholarship around the formation of early modern science needs to pay greater attention to the role of indigenous agents and ontologies in the Americas. It asks how we might understand the nature of the historiographical roadblocks and consider innovative methodological and hermeneutic approaches. Early modern natural history and natural philosophy are utterly entangled with European encounters with non-European cultures. However, despite some notable exceptions, Native Americans and indigenous ontologies remain marginal in these histories of science. Building from my recent essay, “Subaltern Technologies and Early Modernity in the Atlantic World,” (Colonial Latin American Review, 2017), I discuss some of the root causes of this neglect, such as assumptions about epistemology that presume impermeability, and suggest methodologies that might allow better integration of indigenous studies and the history of science.