This volume charts alternative courses through history via the physical conditions and artisanal ecologies in which cultural artifacts were created in Europe from roughly 1400 to 1700.
Maker Space: Creative Environments in Early Modern Europe asks how spatial considerations initiated, supported, and thwarted creative activities and highlights points of intersection and overlap across practices that we otherwise tend to think of as separate. Scholars have long had an interest in, for instance, the workshop, laboratory, studiolo, or Kunstkammer as distinct places of production—named coordinates that situate social and technical actions in a defined context. The essays in this volume use the less fixed notion of space to break open such typologies, emphasizing the fluid, improvisational, and idiosyncratic aspects of creative work. They demonstrate how the ever-shifting array of tools, materials, environmental conditions, and bodies involved in artisanal production redirects our attention to the shared conditions that unite various enterprises of intellection, imagination, experimentation, and making.
The book comprises a series of short case studies and extended meditations on particular sites where the work of the mind and hand coincided, from mines, arsenals, theaters, and imagined hermitages to tailors’ shops, artists’ workshops, the home, and even the space of a chemist’s notebook. This format of short and long essays animates the story of early modern making and thinking practices at various scales. The specifics of these case studies move us away from either totalizing or categorical views that would gloss over the fluid, messy, and insistently material conditions of daily work—that is, the raw material of history. These essays also suggest fundamental shared concerns—from environmental and moral control to the conditions necessary for the mental demands of making—that supersede distinct makers or creative practices.
Maker Space: Creative Environments in Early Modern Europe asks how spatial considerations initiated, supported, and thwarted creative activities and highlights points of intersection and overlap across practices that we otherwise tend to think of as separate. Scholars have long had an interest in, for instance, the workshop, laboratory, studiolo, or Kunstkammer as distinct places of production—named coordinates that situate social and technical actions in a defined context. The essays in this volume use the less fixed notion of space to break open such typologies, emphasizing the fluid, improvisational, and idiosyncratic aspects of creative work. They demonstrate how the ever-shifting array of tools, materials, environmental conditions, and bodies involved in artisanal production redirects our attention to the shared conditions that unite various enterprises of intellection, imagination, experimentation, and making.
The book comprises a series of short case studies and extended meditations on particular sites where the work of the mind and hand coincided, from mines, arsenals, theaters, and imagined hermitages to tailors’ shops, artists’ workshops, the home, and even the space of a chemist’s notebook. This format of short and long essays animates the story of early modern making and thinking practices at various scales. The specifics of these case studies move us away from either totalizing or categorical views that would gloss over the fluid, messy, and insistently material conditions of daily work—that is, the raw material of history. These essays also suggest fundamental shared concerns—from environmental and moral control to the conditions necessary for the mental demands of making—that supersede distinct makers or creative practices.
400 pages | 6.5 x 9.25 | © 2024
Bard Graduate Center - Cultural Histories of the Material World
Art: European Art
History: Discoveries and Exploration, History of Ideas
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
Itineraries
1. Tina Asmussen, “The Subterranean Court”
2. Donna Bilak, “Colonial Chymistry and Spaces of Experiment in Gershom Bulkeley’s Laboratory Notebook”
3. Erin J. Campbell, “The Ecology of Devotion in the Early Modern Domestic Interior”
4. H. Perry Chapman, “Making as Thinking in the Dutch Painter’s Studio”
5. Michael Cole, “Lavinia Fontana, in a Room of Her Own”
6. Thomas Dabbs, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Play Making at the Office of the Revels”
7. Lily Filson, “‘Make It ’til You Fake It’: The Princely Pastime of Alchemical Counterfeiting at the Medici Villa Pratolino”
8. Lucy Havard, “The Experimental Kitchen: Knowledge-Making Activities in the Seventeenth-Century English Home”
9. Merlijn Hurx, “‘Working by Trial and Error’: Sluice Building in Holland as a Place of Experimentation (1550–1600)”
10. Hannah Wirta Kinney, “Intellect and Property in Giambologna’s Borgo Pinti Palazzo”
11. Deborah L. Krohn, “Corrozet’s Blasons domestiques (1539) and the Anatomy of Domestic Space in Early Modern Europe”
12. Meredith Martin, “World in a Room: The Porcelain Ceiling at Santos Palace”
13. John T. McQuillen, “Thinking about an Early Modern Monastic Library: Scheyern Abbey (Bavaria)”
14. Colin Murray, “Vermeer in the Lacemaker’s Studio”
15. Sophie Pitman, “Tailor’s Hell?: The Contested Space of the Early Modern Workshop”
16. Leopoldine Prosperetti, “Rushes, Fronds, and Osiers: Crafting a Hermit’s Hut”
17. Ray Schrire, “St. Paul’s Schoolroom: Paying Attention in Erasmus’s Grammar School”
18. Ad Stijnman, “The Printshop of Jan Pietersz. van de Venne, Middelburg (The Netherlands), 1623”
19. Katherine Tycz, “Pray While You Work: Prayer and Devotional Objects in Workplaces and Work Spaces in Early Modern Italy”
20. Tianna Helena Uchacz, “Hubris and Humility: Workspaces, Environmental Conditions, and the Early Modern Artisan”
21. Steven Walton, “In the Shadow of the Arsenal Gate”
Contributor Bios
Index
Introduction
Itineraries
1. Tina Asmussen, “The Subterranean Court”
2. Donna Bilak, “Colonial Chymistry and Spaces of Experiment in Gershom Bulkeley’s Laboratory Notebook”
3. Erin J. Campbell, “The Ecology of Devotion in the Early Modern Domestic Interior”
4. H. Perry Chapman, “Making as Thinking in the Dutch Painter’s Studio”
5. Michael Cole, “Lavinia Fontana, in a Room of Her Own”
6. Thomas Dabbs, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Play Making at the Office of the Revels”
7. Lily Filson, “‘Make It ’til You Fake It’: The Princely Pastime of Alchemical Counterfeiting at the Medici Villa Pratolino”
8. Lucy Havard, “The Experimental Kitchen: Knowledge-Making Activities in the Seventeenth-Century English Home”
9. Merlijn Hurx, “‘Working by Trial and Error’: Sluice Building in Holland as a Place of Experimentation (1550–1600)”
10. Hannah Wirta Kinney, “Intellect and Property in Giambologna’s Borgo Pinti Palazzo”
11. Deborah L. Krohn, “Corrozet’s Blasons domestiques (1539) and the Anatomy of Domestic Space in Early Modern Europe”
12. Meredith Martin, “World in a Room: The Porcelain Ceiling at Santos Palace”
13. John T. McQuillen, “Thinking about an Early Modern Monastic Library: Scheyern Abbey (Bavaria)”
14. Colin Murray, “Vermeer in the Lacemaker’s Studio”
15. Sophie Pitman, “Tailor’s Hell?: The Contested Space of the Early Modern Workshop”
16. Leopoldine Prosperetti, “Rushes, Fronds, and Osiers: Crafting a Hermit’s Hut”
17. Ray Schrire, “St. Paul’s Schoolroom: Paying Attention in Erasmus’s Grammar School”
18. Ad Stijnman, “The Printshop of Jan Pietersz. van de Venne, Middelburg (The Netherlands), 1623”
19. Katherine Tycz, “Pray While You Work: Prayer and Devotional Objects in Workplaces and Work Spaces in Early Modern Italy”
20. Tianna Helena Uchacz, “Hubris and Humility: Workspaces, Environmental Conditions, and the Early Modern Artisan”
21. Steven Walton, “In the Shadow of the Arsenal Gate”
Contributor Bios
Index