CfP: BSHS Panel on Science and Connoisseurship
Call for Papers: Session proposal organised by Michael Bycroft
and Alex Wragge-Morley
British Society for the History of Science Annual Conference, 6-9
July 2017
Science and Connoisseurship: New Perspectives.
This session seeks to open up new directions in the growing field
of research examining the connections between science and
connoisseurship. Historians have generally examined these
connections by focusing on well-recognised moments in the
emergence of 'art' as a category in European thought, for instance
by revealing the role of the Royal Society of London in providing
an institutional foundation for the arts in the late 17th- and
early 18th centuries, or by examining the appropriation of
artistic discourses and practices by scientific practitioners in
the Italian Renaissance. However, we would like to open up the
field to new lines of inquiry, reflecting recent developments in
historiography and theory.
These could include: 1. What can we learn by studying practices
for assessing the quality of material things, including art
objects, gemstones, scientific instruments, military equipment and
consumer goods? 2. Was connoisseurship an embodied discipline? To
what extent (if ever) were embodied practices for assessing art
objects abandoned? 3. Why did medics play such a crucial role in
the emergence of connoisseurial practices? 4. What can be done to
combine the history of connoissership with the history of
regulatory institutions, from the Bureau de Commerce in
eighteenth-century France to the FDA in twentieth-century America?
5. Which sciences drew on the practices of connoisseurship?
Historians often look at medicine and natural history in the
context of connoisseurial practices. But what about 'harder'
sciences such as mathematics, physics, astronomy and chemistry?
And what about the human sciences? 6. To what extent did practices
for evaluting works of art inform the sciences in non-European
contexts? Do questions about the connections between science and
connoisseurship depend on European understandings of the
disciplinary distinctions between art and science? 7. Were the
practices of connoisseurship implicated in the emergence of
'scientific' theories of race? 8. Did connoisseurial practices
play a significant role in the sciences of the 19th and 20th
centuries?
If you are interested in participating in this panel, please send
a paper abstract of no more than 250 words and a brief bio to
either/both Michael Bycroft (M.Bycroft@warwick.ac.uk)
or Alex Wragge-Morley (alexander.wragge-morley@ucl.