H-Net Review Publication: Cormack on Long, 'Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences,1400-1600'
Pamela O. Long.
Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600. Corvallis
Oregon State University Press, 2011.
xii + 196 pp. $22.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-87071-609-6; ISBN
978-0-87071-647-8.
Reviewed by Lesley Cormack (University of Alberta)
Published on H-Albion (May, 2013) Commissioned by Jeffrey R. Wigelsworth
The Scholar/Craftsman Debate Renewed
In the middle years of the twentieth century, historians
and sociologists began a discussion of the role of craftsmen and craft knowledge
in the creation of the new sciences, or the "scientific revolution."
Marxist scholars such as Boris Hessen, Edgar Zilsel, and members of both the
Vienna Circle and the Frankfurt school argued that the transformation in
natural knowledge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was caused by the
new skills and knowledge of superior artisans, and the interaction between
artisans and humanists. This is often called the "Zilsel thesis,"
although many other thinkers contributed to its articulation. Pamela Long, in
_Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600_, helps to
revitalize this thesis for a new generation and argues effectively that these
artisans or practitioners were a necessary component in changing attitudes
towards nature, evidence, and experimentation. In other words, according to
Long, the superior artisans she investigates influenced the methodology of the
new sciences and acted as a meeting place (a "trading zone") for both
practical and scholarly knowledge.
Long begins with a nice introduction to the historical
debate. She takes us through the Marxist tradition of Hessen and Zilsel, which
began with an emphasis on the materialism of scientific change and moved to a
sociological explanation over time. For Hessen, the machines of the early
modern period (and the steam power of the industrial revolution) led to
particular scientific theories, while for the Frankfurt school and Zilsel, the
social interaction of those who understood and used machines (the superior
artisans) was the trigger for scientific change. Long then examines the
critiques of this position, from Robert Merton to Alexandre Koyr?? and Rupert
Hall, who saw scientific change as philosophical and intellectual, rather than
instrumental. Finally, Long argues that Thomas Kuhn began the new emphasis on
the social (although I believe Kuhn is more of an internalist than Long
supposes) and sees the constructivism of the Edinburgh school leading to a
modern reemergence of theories of the connections between scholar and
craftsman.
Long moves from historiography to an overview of changing
attitudes towards art and nature in the late Middle Ages and early modern
period. Long traces the changing attitudes towards the arts, from low-status
trades to artisanal crafts with high prestige. Aristotle, influential
throughout the Middle Ages, had seen art as having two different and somewhat
contradictory attributes: first, inferior to nature and imitative; second,
completing or improving on nature. This latter characteristic allowed, for
example, the study of alchemy. By the period 1400-1600, Long argues, the second
emphasis of completing nature was gaining popularity. At the same time,
attitudes towards nature itself were changing, as natural philosophers began to
argue that nature could be understood and controlled through experimentation or
manipulation. In other words, Long suggests, art and nature were becoming more
similar and connected and empirical values were becoming generally adopted in
this early modern period.
In her strongest chapter, Long investigates scholars and
practitioners influenced by the Vitruvian tradition. She argues that an
interest in Vitruvius brought together people interested in the theory and
practice of design, building, and antiquity. Scholars achieved skill, craftsmen
achieved scholarship as they studied and discussed design. In fact, she argues,
the labels "scholar" and "craftsman" do not really work in
this context. Rather, both existed in the same person. Long claims this differentiates
her argument from Zilsel's. That is, while Zilsel argued that scholars and
artisans met as individuals engaged in a conversation or collaboration, Long
maintains that it was the interaction of artisanal and humanist culture itself
that changed interpretations of nature. I disagree with this representation of
Zilsel; he emphasized the role of the "superior artisan" who often
combined practical skill and humanistic theory in the same person (think of
William Gilbert). With that small criticism, however, this is a wonderful
chapter. Long has made a great contribution through her discovery of the
importance of Vitruvius to a wide group of scholars, artisans, and patrons and
makes an effective argument that this tradition served as a catalyst for
communication and exchange between scholarship and skill.
Long then uses the concept of "trading zones,"
first developed for history of science by Peter Galison, in order to understand
how the interaction between handwork and headwork might have worked. She points
to arsenals, mines, and the Renaissance city (in her case,
Rome) as sites for these trading zones. Earlier work in
this area has looked instead at coffee houses, book sellers, and
instrument-makers'
shops, so Long introduces some very interesting
alternatives. The problem is that
evidence is hard to come by, so there is more assertion than proof in this
chapter. She also puts this together with several examples that look more like
patronage. For example, she has a very interesting section on the work of the
architect Palladio, who made friends with many important and rich patrons. On
the flip side, she examines the scientific and craft interests of two important
aristocrats, Julius, duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenb??ttel, and Alphonso d'Este of
Ferrara. Unquestionably all three examples show us important communities of
knowledge and interest around skilled craft work and theoretical constructs.
But were all contacts between experts and non-experts "trading
zones"? Or does this fit into the more common notion of patronage?
Long has produced a lively and engaging book. Her thesis,
that "artisans influenced the methodology of the new sciences that
developed from the mid-sixteenth century" is persuasive, if not always
fully proven (p. 127). But this is a book for non-specialists, based on her
lectures as Horning Visiting Scholar in the Humanities at Oregon State
University, and it works well as an accessible introduction to these issues.
She shows that there was substantial interchange between scholarly and craft
ideas, sometimes within a single individual, sometimes within communities of
knowledge and practice. Practitioners gained humanistic knowledge; humanists
and natural philosophers gained empirical and practical skill. For Long, it was
this interaction that facilitated the development of the new sciences, a
hypothesis with much merit.
Citation: Lesley Cormack. Review of Long, Pamela O.,
_Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600_.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. May, 2013.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.