Thematic Approaches to the Study of Science Janskerkhof 2-3, Rm. 013 Organized Session
24 Jul 2019 04:00 PM - 06:00 PM(Europe/Amsterdam)
20190724T1600 20190724T1800 Europe/Amsterdam Practices and Narratives of Experience in Premodern Eurasia

This panel presents four different examples of how historical actors in Latin Christendom and the Ottoman Empire worked within and challenged existing narratives about the epistemic value of experience. The papers comprising this panel explore multiple sites and multiple networks separated by space and time. We move from the medieval cloister and university to the early modern marketplace, we journey to the republic of letters that included early modern scholars from Constantinople to London, and we delve into the engagement of early modern scholars with texts and ideas from centuries earlier. Each paper examines a different set of narratives around experience: how Scholastic philosophers interested in metacognition influenced later work in the life sciences; how competing narratives of experience and authority were employed by different healers in the medical marketplace in sixteenth-century Germany and Italy; how stories about experience and experiment became central to the legend of Roger Bacon, and to later narratives about the development of modern science; and, finally, how natural philosophers and physicians from the Ottoman Empire and the Latin Christian West used experience as a basis for creating universal natural knowledge. Taken together, all four papers portray the robust, complex, and contingent ways in which experience presented a path to natural knowledge, either alongside text-based authority, or in spite of it.

Organized by Elly Truitt

Janskerkhof 2-3, Rm. 013 History of Science Society 2019 meeting@hssonline.org
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This panel presents four different examples of how historical actors in Latin Christendom and the Ottoman Empire worked within and challenged existing narratives about the epistemic value of experience. The papers comprising this panel explore multiple sites and multiple networks separated by space and time. We move from the medieval cloister and university to the early modern marketplace, we journey to the republic of letters that included early modern scholars from Constantinople to London, and we delve into the engagement of early modern scholars with texts and ideas from centuries earlier. Each paper examines a different set of narratives around experience: how Scholastic philosophers interested in metacognition influenced later work in the life sciences; how competing narratives of experience and authority were employed by different healers in the medical marketplace in sixteenth-century Germany and Italy; how stories about experience and experiment became central to the legend of Roger Bacon, and to later narratives about the development of modern science; and, finally, how natural philosophers and physicians from the Ottoman Empire and the Latin Christian West used experience as a basis for creating universal natural knowledge. Taken together, all four papers portray the robust, complex, and contingent ways in which experience presented a path to natural knowledge, either alongside text-based authority, or in spite of it.

Organized by Elly Truitt

Epistemic Configurations: Experience in the Medieval Sciences of Soul and BodyView Abstract
Organized SessionTheoretical Approaches to the Study of Science 04:00 PM - 04:30 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/24 14:00:00 UTC - 2019/07/24 14:30:00 UTC
What were the epistemic configurations of experience in the medieval sciences of soul and body? Simple sense perception, inspectio, anathomia, iudicatio by common sense, pre-universal experientia, and expertise all occupied distinctive, yet decidedly standardized spaces in the cognitive realm of the sapiens. For Peter of Spain (ca. 1215-1277), the science of animal souls and bodies required sense perception and judgment in acquiring knowledge, particularly of its most specific species. For Albert the Great (1200-1280), simple sense perceptions had the epistemic power to verify or falsify theoretical facts in the sciences of soul and body, but they first had to pass the common-sense judgment of the expert. All this shows that scientific experiences were principally shared by the sapientes; they were, so to speak, universal and individual at once. The purpose of this paper is to shed some light on these pragmatics of experience, both by exposing the mental realm as the integral backbone to the practices, standards, and conceptualizations of experience, and by illustrating how the ideals of this realm became embodied in the practices of the medieval life sciences developed by historical actors such as Peter of Spain and Albert the Great.
Presenters
KK
Katja Krause
Max Planck Institute For The History Of Science / TU Berlin
The Right Kind of Experience: Physicians, Empirics, and Poison TrialsView Abstract
Organized SessionMedicine and Health 04:30 PM - 05:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/24 14:30:00 UTC - 2019/07/24 15:00:00 UTC
This paper will examine sixteenth-century physicians’ attempts to portray contrived tests of poison antidotes as a learned endeavor. Poison trials had long been used by charlatans and other empirics, who hawked their nostrums in marketplace shows that involved self-poisoning and poisoning animals. From the 1520s, however, some physicians began to test antidotes using poison on condemned criminals – first at the papal court in Rome and then at other European courts. Their newfound interest in poison trials invited comparison with empirical practitioners’ marketplace shows. Physicians thus came up with deliberate narrative strategies to differentiate their trials from empirical practitioners’ “misguided” tests. One strategy involved explicit contrast between physicians’ tests and the fraudulent shows put on by “itinerant country swindlers,” in the words of German physician Eurichus Cordus (1540). More subtly, physicians penned detailed accounts of poison trials that included careful markers of their learning, such as references to the hours of the clock, pulse checks, and allusions to learned medical theory. They described these trials using scholarly terms designating experience, such as historia, observatio, or experimentum. Some of these accounts were recorded privately; others circulated at courts; and still others were shared publicly, such as Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s detailed account of a poison trial in his popular commentary on Dioscorides. The similarity between these documents, however, suggests a conscious narrative of a “right” way to conduct contrived medical trials with poison.
Presenters
AR
Alisha Rankin
Tufts University
Experience, Discovery, and Utility: Roger Bacon in the Age of FrancisView Abstract
Organized SessionThematic Approaches to the Study of Science 05:00 PM - 05:30 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/24 15:00:00 UTC - 2019/07/24 15:30:00 UTC
This paper examines the importance of experiential knowledge in the work of thirteenth century natural philosopher, courtier, and Franciscan friar Roger Bacon (ca. 1214-1292), who saw experience as central to understanding natural knowledge, and to converting that knowledge into useful tools and processes to improve human life and exert power. Furthermore, this paper demonstrates how Bacon’s views on the necessity of experiential knowledge to confirm and discover the laws of nature dramatically shaped the contours of his reception in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as early modern ideas about utility and experiment. Experiential knowledge is the common thread that runs through the many stories about Bacon that appeared in Latin and in English, on the stage and in historical annals in the early modern period. Whether a figure of sorcery or as a committed experimenter undone by the Church, legends and accounts of Bacon that appeared in the centuries after his death portray him as one interested in learning by doing, and in using natural knowledge in the service of political utility. Bacon’s treatises appeared in the libraries of men like John Dee and Francis Bacon, who found in Bacon’s work an interest in utility, discovery, and experiment that matched their own. Bacon’s interests in experience and experiment, in the service of utility and epistemic gain, are vital to understanding the intellectual transformation often called the Scientific Revolution and reveal important intellectual continuities between the medieval and the early modern periods.
Presenters
ET
Elly Truitt
Bryn Mawr College
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science / TU Berlin
Tufts University
Bryn Mawr College
Department of History, University College London
Dr. Scott Trigg
Society of Fellows in the Humanities, University of Hong Kong
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