Dear All,

I'm very happy to announce a workshop exploring the role of ‘subjective’
practices in the early modern sciences. It will take place on May 4th at
UCL, featuring a brilliant line-up of speakers from disciplines
including the history of science, art history, and literature studies.
They include Charlotte Guichard, Sarah Easterby-Smith, Simon Werrett,
Lorraine de la Verpillière, Elizabeth Swann, and Olivia Smith. The
workshop is organised by myself - Alex Wragge-Morley -  and Michael
Bycroft. The event is free, but registration is required. For full
details and to access registration, see
https://subjectivesciences.wordpress.com/.

All good wishes,

Alex Wragge-Morley

Subjective Sciences: A Workshop on Practices of Taste & Connoisseurship
in Early Modern Europe. UCL, 4th May 2018

This one-day workshop explores the role of ‘subjective’ practices in the
early modern sciences. We are interested in the epistemic dimension of
judgments that we now think of as subjective, either because of the
senses they deploy (such as taste and smell) or because of the ends they
serve (such as determining the quality and originality of a work of
art). What were the technical procedures that early moderns used to make
these judgments? What sort of knowledge was involved in them? And how
did that knowledge stand in relation to early scientific disciplines,
such as medicine, natural history, chemistry and natural philosophy? We
draw on literary history, art history, and the history of science, and
we cover a wide range of things that early moderns made judgements
about, from scientific instruments to the pleasures arising from sensory
experience.

Over the last four decades, scholars have demonstrated that there were
close connections between the early modern arts (from art and
architecture to rhetoric and poetics) and sciences. In this workshop, by
contrast, we do not seek simply to show that the early modern arts and
sciences had a lot in common. Rather, we will develop a more recent
strand of inquiry that seeks to understand how early moderns used the
practices that we today associate with the attribution of value to art –
exemplified by connoisseurship – to produce knowledge about objects in
the world around them. Exemplified by Steven Shapin’s work on the
‘sciences of subjectivity’, this strand of inquiry seeks to understand
the contributions of supposedly subjective forms of judgment to the
production of objectivity.

Subjective Sciences thus brings together leading scholars from a wide
variety of disciplines both to explore the role of connoisseurial
practices in the early modern sciences, and to question present-day
assumptions about their disciplinary scope. Rather than assuming that
connoisseurs concerned themselves only with the high arts, we will
therefore examine the ways in which they brought specialised forms of
judgment to bear on a wide range of different objects. At the same time,
we will seek to expand the scope of connoisseurship, examining the
interplay between practices of measuring, testing, tasting, and smelling
in the formation of judgments about the value and meaning of material
things.


10.00-10.30 –  Registration

10.30-11.00 – Welcome and Introduction
Michael Bycroft & Alexander Wragge-Morley

11.00-11.45 – Charlotte Guichard (CNRS & École Normale Supérieure)
Embedded Knowledge: Jean-Baptiste Le Brun, Value and Connoisseurship
around 1800 in Paris

11.45-12.30 – Sarah Easterby-Smith (University of St. Andrews)
Connoisseurship Beyond the Academy

12.30-13.30 – Lunch
Lunch will be Served for Registered Attendees

13.30-14.15 – Simon Werrett (UCL)
Knowledge or Nick-Nack? Auctions and Experimental Science in
Eighteenth-Century Britain

14.15-15.00 – Lorraine de la Verpillière (University of Cambridge)
Le Médecin Guarissant Phantasie by Matthäus Greuter (c. 1600)

15.00-15.30 – Break

15.30-16.15 – Elizabeth Swann (University of Cambridge)
‘Those Fruits of Natural knowledge’: Erotic Empiricism in
Seventeenth-Century England

16.15-17.00 – Olivia Smith (University of Oxford)
Title to be Confirmed

17.00-18.00 – Concluding Roundtable
Drinks will be Served