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A research group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science on “Itineraries of Materials, Recipes, Techniques, and Knowledge in the Early Modern World” held a series of workshops (2014–2015) on the movement of knowledge(materials, techniques, objects) across Eurasia, resulting in an edited volume. Participants articulated a framework of “entangled itineraries,” “material complexes,” and “nodes of convergence” by which historians might follow routes ofknowledge-making extending over very long distances and/or great spans of time. The key concepts are (1) “material complex” denoting the constellation of substances, practices, techniques, beliefs, and values that accrete as knowledge around materials; (2) the “relational field,” the social, intellectual, economic, emotional domain formed by a “node of convergence”—often a hub of trade and exchange—within which a material complex crystalizes; and (3) “itineraries,” or the routes taken by materials through which they stabilize and/ or transform. 

Hands-on experimentation did not begin in the natural scientific laboratory of the nineteenth century; it is instead a characteristic part of craft processes wherever and whenever they have been carried out – whether the bronze hearths of the pre-historic Near East, the furniture ateliers of the Ancien Régime, or in the kilns of the Saintonge, where Bernard Palissy labored so hard to imitate porcelain. A contemporary manuscript, BnF Ms. Fr. 640, gives remarkable insight into this constant experimentation of the artisan in the workshop. It also highlights the experimentation on paper that Palissy and other craftspeople engaged in during the sixteenth century. 

Through a close reading and reconstruction of technical recipes for ephemeral artworks in a manuscript compiled in Toulouse ca. 1580 (BnF MS Fr. 640), we question whether ephemeral art should be treated as a distinct category of art. The illusion and artifice underpinning ephemeral spectacles shared the aims and, frequently, the materials and techniques of art more generally. Our analysis of the manuscript also calls attention to other aspects of art making that reframe consideration of the ephemeral, such as intermediary processes, durability, the theatrical and transformative potential of materials, and the imitation and preservation of lifelikeness. 

An anonymous author in late 16th-century France recorded 370 pages of art and technical recipes, among which are two especially puzzling entries: one for a medicine from the "east" that involved smoking rosemary in a pipe (a new medicinal device in the 16th century that had come to Europe from North America), and another for closing silkworms in a vessel in order to produce a gold powder. This essay traces these processes across Eurasia, and explores how such movement of medicinal and alchemical knowledge could occur across such long spans of distance and time. 

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European scholars began to search for a new kind of knowledge, what Francis Bacon (1561-1626) in 1620 would call a ‘New Philosophy; or Active Science’ (The Great Instauration, 1620), and what we have come to see as the beginnings of the modern natural sciences. These scholars sought to engage with the things of nature, in addition to the words of texts, and, as they looked about for models of this new kind of enquiry, they took up the case history used by their medical colleagues. They also looked to the methods of history, for history involved gathering observations and experiences about the human world, just as the new type of investigation these scholars sought would observe and collect experiences of the natural realm. They began to call what they did ‘natural history’. These scholars also looked to the handwork of craftspeople and their ability to manipulate natural materials in order to produce valuable products. Where these newly self-described ‘natural historians’ and ‘experimental philosophers’ could read the texts of their medical and historian colleagues, they generally had no such familiar entry point into handwork, for craftspeople produced things, and only rarely recorded their work in words and texts that the scholars could read. As Francis Bacon complained in the Novum Organum, ‘experience is illiterate’. Of course, craftspeople were not illiterate, but were fluent, rather, in a different kind of language and knowledge, one that posed problems for sixteenth-century scholars, and continues to make life difficult for the historians who study them. In the following essay, we suggest that one means for overcoming this problem is to bring historians and natural scientists back into conversation with each other, as they were in the sixteenth century when exploration of the human world provided a model for the just emerging study of the natural realm. Between 1400 and 1700, European craftspeople similarly found words to be inadequate: they paradoxically declared in writing that writing was inadequate to convey their skills, and that book learning was inferior to bodily experience.