BOOK NOTI CE

Ursula Klein and E. C. Spary (eds): Materialsand expertise in early modern Europe: Between marketand laboratory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,2010, 408pp, $50 HB

Jonathan Simon

Published online: 27 October 2010

� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe consists of a collection of a dozen

papers drawn from conferences held in Berlin on the theme of materials and expertise

in 2004 and 2006, edited by Ursula Klein from the Max Planck Institute for the

History of Science in Berlin and Emma Spary from Cambridge University. The range

of materials treated in this volume is impressively large, with the contributions

covering vermilion, blood, ceramics, metal ores, ink, ethers, milk, spa water, liqueurs,

agricultural resources, gunpowder and dyes. The editors endeavour to give some

coherence to the contributions, dividing them into three different ‘parts’—production,

market, state—each with a short introduction pointing to themes that the papers have

in common. In addition, there is a general introduction that situates the subject in a

wider historiographical context, emphasising the growing interest in material culture

in the various sub-disciplines of history. Nevertheless, the papers remain quite diverse

not only in terms of the materials treated, clearly an advantage, but also in terms of the

approach adopted by each of the authors. Thus, there are some papers—those on ink

by Adrian Johns, on ethers by Ursula Klein and on milk (animal and human) by

Barbara Orlan—that concentrate on a particular type of material (with an interest in

the diversity within this group), but there are others, like those on the technologies of

dyeing by Augusti Nieto-Galan and gunpowder in Britain by Seymour Mauskopf, that

are more narrowly concerned with the manufacturing process. The paper on Bernard

Pallisy’s clay reproductions of nature (‘biomorphic earthenware’ as Hanna Rose Shell

terms it) and Matthew Eddy’s on William Laing’s promotion of the medical virtues of

Peterhead spa in Scotland are instead biographical in orientation. To complete the list

of contributions, Emma Spary writes on liqueurs in eighteenth-century France,

Christoph Bartel on mining in the German states, Marcus Popplow on agricultural

economy (again in Germany) and Pamela Smith on vermilion, blood and mercury in

J. Simon (&)

LEPS-LIRDHIST (EA 4148), Universite Lyon 1, Universite de Lyon,

69622 Villeurbanne cedex, France

e-mail: jsimon@recherche.univ-lyon1.fr

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Metascience (2011) 20:413–414

DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9462-8

the alchemical tradition. While several of the contributors do make a conscious effort

to address the question of the relationship between artisanal and academic knowledge

of materials, which is presented as the leitmotif of the book, it does not successfully

emerge as a sustained theme across the different chapters. The interest in the end is for

the individual materials, vermilion, liqueurs, etc., rather than what the collected

volume has to say about materials and expertise in general.

414 Metascience (2011) 20:413–414

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