Claire Sabel is organizing the Panel "Women’s Knowledge and Agency in Early Modern Resource Management" with Gabriele Marcon, at this year's History of Science Society Annual Meeting, in New Orleans, 13-16 November.
This panel explores how women’s engagement with resource management offers new avenues for understanding the gendered production, codification, and transmission of knowledge in the early modern period. Historians of science and technology have long recognized that published mining treatises and their male authors played a crucial role in the development of the early modern earth sciences. This panel instead explores women’s practical knowledge that did not necessarily circulate in print but was nevertheless crucial to both the economies and communities of expertise in the management of mineral resources. Each paper considers a different scale of historical analysis: households in the Ore Mountains, working mines in Medici Tuscany, and commodity chains linking sites of mineral production and consumption across Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. They are based in the material context of early modern mining, a domain of resource management that has been the subject of burgeoning scholarly attention, especially because of the remarkably rich body of archives generated by the administration of mining activities. These include legal disputes, mining rights, payrolls, reports, correspondence and treaties, which have long been used by social and economic historians of mining, but which also offer rich insights into practical knowledge. Together, the three papers aim to generate discussion about the distinctive and integral roles played by early modern women in transforming natural materials into objects of human value.
A Global Approach to Women in Early Modern Mining
Across the early modern world, emerging state authorities and scientific institutions that exploited, conserved, and planned the management of natural resources, such as mining and forestry administrations, agricultural improvement societies, and large-scale irrigation projects were led by men. Many male participants in these enterprises contributed to a burgeoning discourse of “oeconomic” and useful knowledge that has been central to recent historiography of early modern science. This paper aims to illuminate the women missing from these histories and proposes that women’s practical experience of resource management is a significant and under-researched body of knowledge, building on recent work on the intersections of labor and environmental history with the history of science. In addition to recovering exceptional women who did participate in early modern scholarly arenas, feminist scholarship has emphasized women’s widespread roles behind the scenes of scientific work and illuminated embodied and experimental knowledge developed within the household. But much early modern resource management connected domestic settings with diverse workscapes, across cities, rural landscapes, and colonial spaces. This paper shows that women’s expertise and labor were integral to mining projects that linked domestic, commercial, industrial, and courtly sites in the Americas, Europe, and Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I argue that women cultivated and deployed mineral knowledge in varied and active roles, using distinctive and practical expertise. Focusing on resource management reveals women’s contributions to the broader ecosystem of knowledge production about early modern minerals and the earth they were mined from.
For more information on the conference, visit the HSS website [here].
