Material Literacy and the Role of Reconstruction in History of Science Scholarship: ‘Making and Knowing’ in the Lab

Date: April 18, 2016

Time: 12:00 to 1:00 p.m.

Location: Chemical Heritage Foundation, 315 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106

Event Type: Open to the Public

Fee: Free

RSVP Online: No Registration Required

The Making and Knowing Project is a remarkable undertaking that revolves around the textual and practical analysis of a late-16th-century anonymous French manuscript compilation of artisanal recipes of a proto-scientific nature held by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, known as Ms. Fr. 640. This talk examines the pedagogical and research impact of the Making and Knowing Project to ask what happens when we connect textual interpretation to that which is physical, sensory, ephemeral, and experiential.

Headquartered at Columbia University under the direction of Pamela H. Smith (History Department), and in affiliation with the Chemical Heritage Foundation, the Making and Knowing Project establishes a space to gather and synthesize expert knowledge from a wide range of scholars, conservators, and artisans, which flows into the production of the open-source online critical edition of Ms. Fr. 640. This collective endeavor is characterized by diverse scholarly and craft methodologies. These underpin the manuscript’s exploration by Columbia graduate students, who interpret and reconstruct the recipes in our laboratory/seminar, integrating their work into annotation essays to form the edition’s critical commentary, thus rooting it in student-generated content.

This talk also questions such material approaches for which the Making and Knowing Project provides an interesting context for assessment: What kinds of knowledge does the study of things in fact yield? What should determine the protocols that would support their use as a viable methodology for piecing together the past? How can scholars effectively engage in these modes of investigation?

Donna Bilak is the History of Science and Technology Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University and a Columbia-CHF Scholar for the Making and Knowing Project. She was the 2013–2014 Edelstein Postdoctoral Fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia where her research focused on analysis of the Atalanta fugiens (1618), an alchemical emblem book that encodes laboratory technologies using music and images. Bilak’s doctoral research reconstructed the life and times of a 17th-century Puritan alchemist who operated in England and America, and her research encompasses early modern European history of science and alchemy, early modern emblem culture, as well as 19th-century jewelry history and technology.

Brown Bag Lectures (BBLs) are a series of weekly informal talks on the history of chemistry or related subjects, including the history and social studies of science, technology, and medicine. Based on original research (sometimes still in progress), these talks are given by local scholars for an audience of CHF staff and fellows and interested members of the public.

For more information, please call 215.873.8289 or e-mail bbl@chemheritage.org.