Joint Meeting of The History of Science Society and the European Society for the History of Science
Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
Sebastian Felten, Claire Sabel and Sarah Seinitzer are participating at this year's Joint Meeting of the History of Science Society and the European Society for the History of Science in Edingburgh.
Time: 12-16 July, 2026
Place: Edingburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom.
The History of Science Society and the European Society for the History of Science are holding their first joint meeting from 12–16 July 2026 in Edinburgh, Scotland, with the support of the British Society for the History of Science.
SCARCE team members Sebastian Felten, Claire Sabel and Sarah Seinitzer are participating as Chairs, Session Organizers and Presenters.
Find out more about the meeting and its program.
Mon, 13 July, 9:15 to 10:45 GMT; EICC, Floor: Level 0, Moorfoot Suite
Chair: Sarah Seinitzer
Session Organizer: Laura Schiavone
Presentations are held by Martina Ravaioli, Laura Schiavone, Laura Guinot-Ferri and Elena Danieli.
Abstract:
In the Early Modern period, attempts to describe the female body were central to the medical and broader scientific enterprise. With the development of anatomy, the insides of the human body had come to light, but narratives of discovery and uncertainty informed anatomical descriptions of the female body. Research in the field of the history of medicine has shown that scientific attempts to understand it are intertwined with political, social, and religious efforts to establish social norms, moralize and regulate sexuality, and exercise control over generation and family structures. This organized session aims at decentralizing and contextualizing the role of early modern institutional medicine in the description of female bodies within the wider landscape of scientific and cultural discourses.
We explore the role of non-medical knowledge, particularly of Latin and Greek literature, in the construction of learned physicians’ authority over the regulation of sex categories, such as that of the tribade. Moreover, we highlight the plurality of knowledge surrounding female bodies in different settings. We suggest that women who described their defloration and pregnancy in courts of law were active carriers of medical knowledge surrounding their bodies. We argue that canonization processes constitute a key source for analysing the role of women in articulating their own gendered illness narratives. Finally, we analyse the relationship between the knowledge of male surgeon-obstetricians and of female midwives in the field of women’s medicine.
Through these examples, we explore the multiple voices and disciplines that intertwined in the description of the female body, questioning which goals, interests and discourses shaped the early modern construction of and regulation of the female body as a sex category.
Tue, 14 July, 9:15 to 10:45 GMT; EICC, Floor: Level 1, Platform 5
Chair: Claire Sabel
Session Organizer: Nuno Castel-Branco
Presentations are held by Marlis Hinckley, Caroline Elizabeth Murphy, Nuno Castel-Branco and José María Moreno Madrid.
Abstract:
In the 2017 article “The History of Science and the History of Knowledge,” Lorraine Daston described the evolution of our discipline from an exclusive focus on the Scientific Revolution to what she calls the history of knowledge. Behind her claim is the fact that, in the past decade alone, historians have written about early modern alchemy, craftsmanship, the environment, magic, navigation, and so on. But where and how did different kinds of knowledge intersect with one another? What new ideas did such interdisciplinary meetings generate, if at all? And what social and institutional patronage supported them? With a few exceptions—Pamela Long and Domenico Bertoloni Meli being two notable examples—, the bridges between areas of knowledge remain to be further explored. This panel explores these questions by examining cases from the sixteenth-century Americas to the early modern Mediterranean. The papers in the panel cover the social and intellectual influence of anatomists in Galileo’s circles; the medicinal plants used by Nahuas and Spaniards in sixteenth-century Mexico; the technicians appointed by the Medici family to the Duchy of Tuscany's first river management office; and the global itinerary of Ignacio Muñoz (c. 1610–1686), the Dominican friar who disassembled a Galileo telescope in Mexico City. Together, these contributions explore what can be gained by studying the intersections of knowledge in the early modern period.
Tue, 14 July, 11:00 to 12:30 GMT; EFI, 1.50
Chair: Sebastian Felten
Session Organzier: Lavinia Maddaluno
Presentations are held by Camille Cordier and Patricia Martins Marcos.
Abstract:
The “subsistence question” — how societies addressed the spectre of food scarcity — has been central to enquiries from social and economic histories to the history of science, knowledge, and medicine. Recently, environmental and intellectual historians renewed interest in scarcity’s history, focusing on its evolution in early modern and modern Europe and its links to sustainability and the Anthropocene. Yet, less attention has been paid to hybrid but asymmetrical technical and environmental knowledges mobilised to counter food scarcity in tropical climates and Atlantic economies, despite interest in colonial and non-European geographies and in how Europeans experienced the tropics. Similarly, links between food scarcity and other resource scarcities, or between food and labour scarcity in plantation economies, are under-explored.
This series of three panels fosters a shift in perspective by showcasing contributions on the knowledge and practices — environmental, indigenous, gendered, hybrid, and political — developed to address scarcity, along with the actors, European and non-European, human and non-human, involved in these efforts. The papers move between macro and micro scales, articulating these predicaments through case studies from diverse regions of the globe.
More specifically, the first panel, “Material Practices,” explores how scarcity prompted a reorganisation of botanical and artisanal knowledge in colonial worlds. The second, “Race and Scarcity,” examines how shortages of crops and of humans in plantation economies and colonial settlements intersected with racial discourses, projects of human improvement, and surveillance. The third, “Connectivities,” opens toward a trans-imperial and oceanic scale, analysing how concerns about food vulnerability shaped imperial botany, cash-crop cultivation, and the use of indigenous knowledge of non-human animals.
Wed, 15 July, 9:15 to 10:45 GMT; EICC, Floor: Level 2, Lennox 1
Chair: Sebastian Felten
Session Organizers: Tina Asmussen and Pamela Smith
Presentations are held by Pamela Smith, Amelia Hutchinson and Claire Sabel, who is presenting “The parts of the World known to contain Diamonds”: the Science and Politics of Minescapes in Early Modern Southeast Asia.
Abstract:
This panel introduces the MINESCAPES Project, which investigates mining landscapes as socio-natural sites shaped by millennia of human-environment interaction. Papers in this panel introduce the Minescapes concept and the Experiential Traveling Seminars that serve as research and pedagogical frameworks, and provide examples of how the Minescapes concept can be applied as an approach and an analytic to study human-nature relationships in diverse times and places. The papers in this panel provide examples from Europe and Southeast Asia of the ways that studying Minescapes can illuminate historical relationships between human body and environment, or among natural science, commerce, and geopolitics.
Wed, 15 July 15, 14:30 to 16:00 GMT; EICC, Floor: Level 2, Lennox 1
Chair: Tina Asmussen
Session Organizer: Sebastian Felten
Presentations are held by Mathijs Boom, Hailian Chen and Sebastian Felten, who talks about Epistemic Virtues and Narratives of Sustainability in 19th-Century German Mining.
Abstract:
This panel is harnessing the history of science to better understand religious symbols in the context of extraction. Classic and recent accounts of the history of geology have shown that biblical references were conducive to the emergence of modern geohistory, and that scientific knowledge continued to interact with religious audiences in complex processes of secularisation and desecularisation. Moving from science to the administration of resources, the panel explores how religious and cosmological belief systems served as a knowledge matrix when workers, experts, scholars, and administrators surveyed landscapes for precious materials, justified technical solutions, and devised theories about the genesis and end of deposits.
The panel brings together research on minescapes in the early modern Netherlands, 19th-century Germany, and Late Qing China to explore complex interactions among science, technology, and belief systems, or, more concretely, between fengshui masters and engineers, Pietists and technical experts, and Calvinists and peat-cutters. Taken together, they highlight the ambiguous role of religion and cosmology as both a cultural constraint on unbridled exploitation of natural resources and a catalyst for settlement, development, and displacement.
Thu, 16 July, 11:00 to 12:30 GMT; EFI, 2.35
Chair: Tina Asmussen
Session Organizers: Monica Azzolini and Sarah Seinitzer
Presentations are held by Monica Azzolini, Nichola Harris and Sarah Seinitzer, who is presenting La Serenissima in Vial and Powder: Mineral Remedies in the Ricettari of Early Modern Venice.
Abstract:
This panel explores the intersection of natural philosophy, alchemy, and medicine in the early modern period, focusing on the roles of res inanimatae (minerals, earths, stones, juices …) in medical theory and practice. Early modern physicians, apothecaries, and natural philosophers often turned to the mineral world and alchemical substances to develop remedies and explain bodily processes. Minerals, with their perceived transformative and purifying properties, were central to medical treatments: how were they prepared and dispensed in early modern paracelsian and non-paracelsian pharmacopeias? The panel will examine how these materials were conceptualised, prepared, and applied within the medical contexts. Topics include the alchemical preparation of mineral-based medicines, the theoretical frameworks that justified their use, and the cultural and spiritual dimensions of res inanimatae. By analyzing medical texts, alchemical treatises, antidotaries, and case studies, the panel will shed light on the blurred boundaries between science, medicine, and mysticism in this period as well as the complex relationship between the ippocratico-galenic and paracelsian traditions. This panel aims to contribute to the growing scholarship on the material culture of early modern medicine, offering new insights into the dynamic interplay between natural substances and medical innovation.
Questions include:
Sebastian Felten is a historian of science, finance, and bureaucracy in early modern Europe. He is Tenure Track Professor of Early Modern History of Science at the Department of History at the University of Vienna and was a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Berlin (MPIWG) between 2015 and 2018. He is the PI of the ERC Project SCARCE.
His current research explores knowledge about nature through a focus on mineral resources as they featured in metallurgy, mineralogy, economics, and ergonomics. He has studied commerce and bureaucracy using the tools of historical epistemology to build bridges between the history of science and social, cultural and economic history. His objective for the next years is to apply this integrated approach to understand the peculiar rationality of early modern resource extraction in Central Europe, which was often highly contradictory.
Claire Sabel is a historian of early modern earth sciences, extractive industries, and empire, with expertise in Dutch and British empires in Southeast Asia. Her research explores how knowledge about the earth and environment were shaped by the growth of European imperialism and overseas trade in the Indian Ocean. She received her PhD in History of Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2024 and is currently a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC project SCARCE, and is affiliated with the Key Research Area in History of Science. This project aims to produce a critical history of natural resource management, focusing on Central Europe in a global perspective.
Sarah Seinitzer is a PhD student and researcher at the ERC project SCARCE. She is writing her PhD Thesis about the ambivalent nature of metals in the early modern period, focusing on mercury and arsenic coming from the eastern Alpine mines. Her research traces the journey of these toxic metals from their extraction sites to their use as medical agents in the medical centres of Northern Italy.
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Funded by the European Union (ERC, SCARCE, Grant number 101076422). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
