“I’ve Got a Thing,” the first season of The Premodern Podcast, is a series of conversations about the objects, documents, and stories that premodernists just can’t stop thinking about. In this episode, JB Shank discusses lathe-turned ivories as a lens for thinking about early modern European courts and elite engagement with the arts and sciences.
“I’ve Got a Thing,” the first season of The Premodern Podcast, is a series of conversations about the objects, documents, and stories that premodernists just can’t stop thinking about. In this episode, JB Shank discusses lathe-turned ivories as a lens for thinking about early modern European courts and elite engagement with the arts and sciences.
Dr. JB Shank is a Morse Alumni Distinguished University Teaching Professor of History at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities as well as affiliate faculty in Art History, French and Italian, Religious Studies, and the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. He is interviewed by Elijah Wallace, a graduate student in History, at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.
Link to Transcript for this Episode
Link to Learn about the Center for Premodern Studies
Our theme music is “Dangerous Diamonds” by Rogue Valley written by Chris Koza.
Our intermission music is "Summer is icumen in" by Anya Badaldavood.
This episode was produced by Moinak Choudhury.
Transcript by Karen Soto
The conversations on this podcast represent the framing and views of individual scholars which are not necessarily shared by the Center for Premodern Studies, the University of Minnesota, and their staff and affiliates.
The Premodern Podcast
Season 1: I’ve Got a Thing
Episode 3: Early Modern Lathe-turned Ivories with J.B. Shank
[00:00:20] Karen Soto: This is “I've Got A Thing” from the Center for Premodern
Studies at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
[00:00:30] Dr. JB Shank is a Morse Distinguished University Teaching Professor
and affiliate faculty in the departments of art history, French and Italian at the
University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Elijah Wallace is a PhD candidate in history
at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.
[00:00:52] Elijah Wallace: So we are here to day on “I’ve Got A Thing” talking
about particular objects and I don't wanna spoil anything ‘cause you showed me
some beautiful pictures.
J.B. Shank: Yeah.
Elijah Wallace: And we're gonna use that as a way to expand and sort of talk
about how these objects are connected to your work. But, uh, let's just dive right in.
What is your thing?
[00:01:10] J.B. Shank: Alright. Turned ivory objects, turned on the lathe—that's
the thing. I guess I'll say one further thing about what defines the thing is not only
are these specific to Europe and to mechanical lathes, they are almost entirely
court-based art objects. The lathes were produced in workshops, often in big,
artisanal cities like Nuremburg, Augsburg, elsewhere, Florence. The practitioners
of turning were often members of guilds—there was a turning guild— and there
were, um, apprenticeship programs and journeymen and Grand Tour and all those
things that are associated with guild-based artisanal practice in Europe in this
period was part of this. This was seen as a very elevated art. And when one studies
the guild cultures of Europe, you talk usually about, um, elevation occurring given
the medium you're working in. So, goldsmiths, for example, were the highest of the
artisans ‘cause they worked with gold. At some level, ivory was precious like that
as well, but different from those from goldsmiths or silversmiths or those who
work with precious gems and other things like this.
There was also this connection to the lathe and the sophisticated understanding of
the production of lathes. And that one part of the story is the development of lathe
technology around this production, but then the other was the use of the lathe and
how to, um, produce these objects. And just as a final thing, what makes my thing
“my thing” is that it's not then just carved ivory objects. It's carved ivory that are
explicitly turned on a lathe as opposed to just taking the ivory in your hand and
carving them in this way. And there is a very—and this becomes because of this
elevation of these artists, Court Turner, was often in these Renaissance and early
modern courts, the highest of the court artists.
Elijah Wallace: Wow.
J.B. Shank: There was a practice in fact of the Court Turner not only producing
these objects for the sovereign, for the patron, producing them as gifts, as objects
that went into the kunstkammer that might be assembled by the prince, but also the
practice of teaching, usually the heir to the throne, the young child who was
succeeding, but even the sovereign, uh, himself or herself— there were also
females who did this—who would go work on their own lathe as a meditative
practice or as a practice for how to pass your leisure time as a sovereign. So the
court turner was not only making objects for the royal court, was embedded in the
court structure, and the practice of turning itself was a courtly practice that was
part of the whole regimen of sovereign living in a princely court in this way. So,
put that whole assemblage together and you get my thing and when I showed you
are the pictures of some of these objects, but I could give you more on, for
example, the lathes, the images of individuals at the lathe, and things like that.
Elijah Wallace: That would be interesting. I'm sure we'll include those on the
digital platform. So yeah, that opens up a lot of questions, like the connection to
the triangular trade, right? It's exclusively, uh, high, you know, high court item,
and yet you don't think of—and maybe this might be just a medievalist
preconceptions looking at it—but you would think, uh, that it would be— and you
know, looking later on with the industrial revolution—an oppositional part on the
part of the guilds. Uh, you think of more handcraft than any sort of mechanical
involvement. And especially when you talk about princes sitting down and, uh, you
know, using the lathe, you think like, “Okay, this is something I've never heard of
with European nobility.” Uh, so just explain real quick what's going on here.
[00:05:22] J.B. Shank: That's an excellent question, and in fact, one of the things
that interests me in this is it's a site of the intersection of all kinds of different
registers of cultural analysis in this way, particularly for me, the history of science
and technology. I mean, what first drew me to these was when I saw some of them
and what has been produced via the lathe is the nested platonic solids from platonic
geometry, which is in my other work—I do history of mathematics and things like
this. But, I then sort of dived in. I wanted to know more about these and found that
there's almost no scholarship on this, per se. There's pieces of it. But the one
exception was a guy who, um, I can't remember his name off the top of my head—
I have his book down here somewhere. Um, but he was the, um, he was a curator at
the Deutsches Museum in Nuremburg. The kind of national German museum that's
in Nuremberg and was a curator of instruments and like mechanical things and his
orientation was precisely kind of industrial technology and he wrote a whole book,
for example, on clocks and the emergence of mechanized things. What struck him
as interesting about this whole culture of turning and led him to, to kind of
excavate it—and it's not really a book, it's really a kind of museum catalog of
objects that's good ‘cause it's the only book we have, but it sort of still needs to
have someone come in and really expand it into a full-fledged monograph, a book
in this way. But it was precisely the lathe as an object that was not yet the
mechanical, industrial lathe and that's what ends—and when I say it sort of comes
into a close this history in the late 18th century— one of the things that brings it to
a close is the emergence of industrial machinery and the, the transformation of the
lathe from an object that is both mechanical but also highly, highly artistic. The,
uh, turner in running the lathe and then working the lathe is as much a freeform
artist as a user of an instrument. And there's the stuff I've been working on is the
way in which they theorize this as a practice that was both mechanical but also
fully free and artistic.
What happens as you get with the 19th century is that the lathe loses that freeform
quality and becomes like, as we know, a device for producing precision screws or
something like that where there's no human play at all. That's the point. The point
of a mechanical aid is to be able to do something with a mechanical precision that
no human can. Right? And in that world, the lathe stops being this kind of, artistic
mechanical device and starts being a kind of, uh, deterministic kind of machine
technology. The other thing that's interesting is that that same transition, whether
linked or not, corresponds with really the end of the great early modern court
cultures. It's in the wake of the French Revolution, American Revolution, industrialization combined with democratic polities and the sort of departure of,
you know,sovereign in his or her court as the sovereign base. And the two come
together so that by, you know, the middle of the 19th century, this culture that, um,
has thrived in the early modern appear comes to an end. And, you know, one of
your questions is kind of “What interests me about this as a pre-modernist?”
whatever. It's precisely, I'm just always fascinated by these places where you see
both the liminal relation of the contemporary with the past, but also these kind of
transition moments where you're, you witness the departure, the decline, the
disappearance of a cultural form in the wake of a new modern cultural form and
what to do with that or how to understand that.
[00:9:50] Elijah Wallace: Yeah. And you can sort of see, um, I just, as you were
saying, that thought of chinaware and that becoming, going from this very, uh, you
know, niche at least, uh, you know, uh, item to mass production.
J.B. Shank: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Elijah Wallace: Exactly. In the 18th century in the mid-18th century.
J.B. Shank: And there's, there's coincidental connection in that. One of the key
figures, um, in the production of European chinaware, the person who—I mean the
question with, with porcelain, right, which arrives in Europe with the, you know,
uh, it's always coming in through the old Silk Road and things like this, but really
reaches a new proliferation with boats and the, you know, opening up of
transatlantic and transpacific kinda, uh, navigation. What, um, that triggers in
Europe is the questions, “Well, how can we make this at home? How can we
produce this?” And what they can't figure out is how the Chinese cook the paste
basically, and it turns out to be a result of need for a certain kind of oven that
reaches a sufficiently high temperature and the person who accomplishes that is in
the court of the elector of Saxony. Um, his name is Tschirnhaus and the result of it
is what's called, uh, Meissen ware, which still is produced from that part of the
world. That court is also, uh, really an important haven of courtly turning. Um, so
there is this sort of connection between and, and—whereas porcelain immediately
becomes a kind of commercial product and, and Meissen ware continues to be
produced today into the industrial era as a kind of classic commercial capitalist
thing, here again, turned ivory objects disappear. They never make, there's no such
thing as a kind of turn— I mean, you still have people producing, like with wood
and other things, artistically turned objects using lathes, but, even there, by the
middle of the 19th century, the idea of the lathe is to get this uniform, say chair
pedestal or something that, that, um, is not about its particularity or its artistic
diversity. It's about uniformity and standardization.
Elijah Wallace: And, and then when you have the reaction against that, like later
in the 19th century and the early 20th, people just skip and go all the way back to
handicraft.
[00:12:30] J.B. Shank: Yeah, exactly. Well, and, and yeah. So these objects, as
you get into the 19th century, these objects will become the absolute, um, paragon
of, right, of what is seen as Baroque decadence. The kind of excess ornament,
excess frills. I mean, what are these objects? Nothing but the indulgence of a
corrupt, you know, a dying court culture seeking this. And yet these are exactly the
kinds of mythic stories that I love to try to poke apart.
[00:13:05] Elijah Wallace: That actually leads to the next question. What is a—is
this the only misconception people might have about these objects? Uh, that these
are just this princely excess and no wonder the guillotine came for them.
[Laughter]
J.B. Shank: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. No, exactly. And, and, and putting that
into a wider frame, it is absolutely. If you see this as a pathway into Baroque core
culture, by which we mean, you know, late Renaissance, either the Rococo and
then is sort of [...] are sort of brought into its demise by Enlightenment, right, in
that way then, yeah, it's these things, the misconception is that that's how to
understand them as objects of a culture that is, you know, possesses excess wealth,
indulges in excess wealth, has sort of just reached a kind of, you know, overripe
pinnacle of corruption in this way. Along those lines, which goes— this is where
this connects to my larger work for the last 25 years—is that, um, part of that is
also recognizing that this practice and these objects should not be dismissed as,
again, Baroque excesses, but are in fact, um, embodied in them is a science. A
science that needs to be understood as just as complex, just as sophisticated as our
science today. And that the scientific nature of these things and the production of
them and how this court culture saw itself as a science and, and, uh, saw uh, this
elite status, rather than it being, “Oh, this is a decadent court supporting those like
them.” The people who were at the center of this, who were elite were because
they were the seen as the most learned, the most masterful in their understanding of
the whole natural world. And here, um one of the, the very first connections to
this—which you'll have to put into the pictures—um, but I said I went into the, um,
museums that had these objects, and I see this nested, platonic solid. And
immediately what I thought of is the, one of the, um, images in Johannes Kepler,
famous for the laws of planetary motions, but his work, Harmonice Mundi, he
publishes a kind of— it's not actually a frontispiece, but it's like a frontispiece— a
kind of front image of the cosmos as he understands it in this book, that is a nesting
of the platonic solids. And the maker of the object I saw was in the same court of
Rudolph II at Prague that Kepler was in when he did that very same thing, and that
there was this very direct link between what we now look back on as mathematical
science, mathematical cosmology, and these things, and the making of these turned
ivory objects. That is not, again, a Baroque excess or a sort of, you know, last gasp
of the old way of thinking that now is going to be liberated with new science, but
in fact a pre-modern kind of scientific formation that needs to be made visible. So
that means getting contemporary viewers to see this kind of thing as a kind of
science, not as, you know, elaborate art as opposed to science. So it's also part of
recognizing that there is no really two cultures divide between art and science, that
they need to be understood as two sides of a similar, similar set of arrangements.
[00:16:50] Elijah Wallace: I guess I would ask also, what is the geographic spread
of this culture? Uh, you know, the instances you named particularly are the old
Hapsburg lands and the German principalities, but does it go further than that? Is
this something in France, England, uh, you know, Spain?
J.B. Shank: That’s, exactly. That’s a key part of my research. So I discovered it in
Dresden—which is connected to, right, the electors of Saxony— in their
kunstkammer which still survives, the Grünes Gewölbe. As I've now, um, visited a
number of kunstkammer that tend to still, you know, it’s not that— there's a
complicated story about how we understand kunstkammers or whatever, but the,
the, the heart of the kunstkammer culture, at least from the extent of where have
they survived and where are they most evident now for us to see is the German
lands up until, uh, Northern Europe, particularly Denmark, in, in this way.
And um, then there's this interesting across the Alps— and I've given some papers
about this— across the Alps, about Italy, where what I've said about this is that this
sort of defies the standard European cultural history story, which sees everything
born in Italy and then spreading out around the world. Turning—which is very
powerful in, um, very prominent in Florence, let's say, right up until the time of
Galileo—comes north to south and the turning culture comes into Florence from
the north. And, and these German cities like artisanal cities, like Augsburg,
Nuremberg, but then the court cities of Dresden, Munich, Prague, um, Vienna, um,
Schloss Ambras at Innsbruck has these things. But then I, I went out—there's a
kunstkammer that's preserved out in and on the Esterházy family, which those who
know of this family probably know that it's connected to the German composer
Handel—they were the patrons of them— but they're an old, uh, Hungarian-
German family and they have this castle out on the edge of what's now Austria on
what was, at the time, the borderlands with the Ottoman in the space. And their
kunstkammer is full of turned ivory objects in this way. So you have this German
connection. But, we know—and this was the book whose name I can't... Klaus and
it's, his last name is either Klaus or his first name is Klaus ‘cause he's a German,
this book I mentioned before— he notes, um, turning culture among the Stuart
monarchs in England and among the French. And the French, um, the first—like a
lot of artisanal cultures, right— turners kept their secrets to themselves and passed
them on within the guild structures, right, as part of the apprentice system. So there
weren't manuals published and there weren't, you know, there's no, you can't go
read treatises on this sort of thing, but the first was published right after 1700 by a
French turner who was also in this case, uh, uh, a monk. So there, there are these
interesting religious connections although that's more the exception that proves the
rule. But anyway, and he publishes it and it, and it becomes then the basis for the
chapters, including the plates on turning that are in the Encyclopédie, Jean le Rond
d'Alembert’s Encyclopédie.
So, and the French Kings into the 18th century are known to turn, and the book
that I described ends wonderfully by describing Louis XVI retreating to his
chambers with his lathe in the 1780s as he’s sort of distracting himself or trying to
escape the French Revolution, uh, awaiting his execution right in ‘92 and that it's a
kind of perfect image of the sort of death of the court culture and court turning and
the wake of the Revolution.
So just the one little wrinkle. I've done more work that there's interesting
kunstkammers and interesting ivory turning, I found—I dunno if I sent it to you—
I think the picture of a carved ivory object, but it's a carved ivory figurine of a man
at his lathe turning in this way. I found that at the museum in Braunschweig, what
in English is called Brunswick, right.
And um, the court of Braunschweig-Lünenburg is a really interesting and
massively understudied kind of court. It, it doesn't, ‘cause it's, you know— The
historiography of early modern Europe is all about the rise of these nation states,
right? And here Germany is the famous place that goes the Sonderweg, right? They
don't nationalize, they don't create, they create this set of principalities still caught
in old Baroque cultures, ergo, they're ripe for bad things like Hitler and you know,
and that sort of thing. So what was interesting about going to Braunsweg is
recognizing, seeing that they have like in this collection in their kunstkammer
these, you know, Rigaud portraits of Louis XIV and all these kinds of things from
that time, from the glory days of the French courts and are clearly demonstrating
their own attachments to, or their own looking to Versailles as their, um, you
know, alliance in this way. Which suggests to me that maybe there was, again, a
kind of north to France rather than the golden age of Versailles spreading east and
creating all these sorts of things to be examined. And these are exactly the kind of
things. But, but you know, Klaus, whatever the name of his, ah, the book is, um, he
notes simply that France, the French court is one where this exists. But then I'll just
say one last thing. What, uh, is clearly not the case is the whole Spanish, um,
Hapsburg or then down into the, the Sicily—that court culture develops a very
different pattern and this is not a practice that's associated with Madrid or Lisbon
or, or Naples or Sicily, uh, going down in this way. So it, it is this oddly European,
but a particular European. Uh, and that's one of the things I wanna try to sort out
and figure out what to do with that.
[00:24:20] Elijah Wallace: So that's interesting in a lot of dimensions because there's
not a strict north-south or confessional divide with it.
J.B. Shank: No, exactly.
Elijah Wallace: But, there is something that is not in, uh, that...
J.B. Shank: Let me say though, actually, um, it's not Protestant.
Elijah Wallace: Okay.
J.B. Shank: And this, this, and again, the idea in a way of a Baroque court culture
that is seriously Protestant. In that sense, that is a kind of, it's imagining oil and
water. So all of these courts are Catholic. Uh, and, but then you go to Spain, right?
That's as Catholic as Catholic can get. There they don't have it. So that's the sort of
interesting thing. But, um, but yeah, you don't find— And, and, and here are the
Stuarts, you might say, “Well, what about them?” But, but that. England in that
period is caught in, you know, Henry VIII does what Henry VIII does and sets in
motion the dynamics about, you know, the Anglican church that wants to be, you
know, as Catholic as the Pope, while not being Catholic. And then, but meanwhile
the rise of Puritanism, of Protestantism. So it doesn't really, it's not a problem in
my mind that the Stuarts practice it. And then after that, it's all these other Northern
European courts that are, if not overtly Catholic, are kind of politique about it but
are not Protestants.
Elijah Wallace: Right. Yeah. There are no Calvinists doing this.
J.B. Shank: Exactly. Exactly.
Elijah Wallace: So, but that's interesting ‘cause I was thinking like, yes the Stuarts
are very much and they always get accused of being these crypto-Catholics and
trying to imitate, you know, the French or something. But I was thinking, well this
must have come from the Wittelsback connection or you know, some sort of
connection with the, the—
J.B. Shank: I should be taking notes here. [Laughter] You know about something I
don’t know about that.
Elijah Wallace: Well yeah because, uh. Whose daughter was it? It was either
James' daughter or Charles's daughter was married to—
J.B. Shank: No. Right. And that's the Danish connection.
Elijah Wallace: Oh, okay. Because they were—
J.B. Shank: James I. James I married a daughter of the Danish crown, but the
Danish crown itself is this connection of Danes with Germans and from—
Elijah Wallace: Yeah, ‘cause they ruled over the Palatinate as well.
J.B. Shank: That is a perfect example of what I'm talking about in the sense that in
that marriage, the Stuarts were aligning themselves with the kind of court culture
that was already thriving. So yeah, that, if that's what you mean by the Wittelsbach
connection, then it makes perfect sense.
Elijah Wallace: Yes. And I thought there was one that was married actually to
Frederick, so the one that tried to become uh, King of Bohemia.
J.B. Shank: No, I, you know, it's so funny you bring this up. I just two weeks ago
went to Denmark—it's my first ever visit to Copenhagen that I went explicitly
because of this set of, uh, documents, a few of this book I was talking about that
points to Copenhagen as a real haven for turning. And it was and fascinating. And
I've now come back, um, wanting to know a lot more about the Danish court. Like
I went to Hamlet's castle for example. Right. And, and you just start to realize
when you're there that in the late 16th and into the 17th century—which is the
heyday, this is when all this takes off—England is looking to Copenhagen or to
Denmark as an example of a kind of thriving monarchy. So the Frederick II
marries, um, a German princess. Um, that's the basis of his court. His son, I think
it's Christian V who succeeds him. Their daughter marries James I.
Elijah Wallace: Oh, okay.
J.B. Shank: And they have, and as a young man, um, and they have in, in the
palaces various stories of the many weddings they had to have to and the journeys
they made where he came to Denmark and. And so then that went back to England
and established this bloodline connection between the Danish court and uh, and the
Stuart court.
[00:28:32] Elijah Wallace: So there are so many things. It makes you realize the
interconnectedness, even though we think of the hardening of, you know, these sort
of kingdom and national boundaries, uh, so that there is this common, uh, elite
culture across all of those lines. But then also the reversing of some of these things,
like as you mentioned with Louis XIV, we buy his propaganda that he is the sun
over Europe. Or that things just went, you know, uh, from south to north, which is
definitely, you know, I'm not gonna say propaganda, but that's how they print. I
mean, with things like the reprinting of the, you know, Tacitus’ uh, Germania, you
know, just reinforcing that, that, “Okay, well when we were building Rome, this,
you know, this is what was happening north of the Alps.”
J.B. Shank: Absolutely. And if you sort of take another level up of abstraction,
and I'm the kind of historian that never met abstraction I didn't like. I'm always
really, all of this is also fighting against these standard modernization narratives of
Europe, right, in which there's a geography flow to it. And then there's this idea of,
of a movement, particularly with like Louis XIV’s court towards, you know, it's
Louis XIV’s court that creates the Academy of Sciences, rational bureaucracies, all
these things and that he represents a kind of movement from old, archaic kind of
structures to new, modern administrations of science. One finds instead that at the
heart of his court was this kind of culture of ivory turning or things like this. This
just throws these wrenches into these stories and forces you to see crooked,
crooked paths, you know, paths that go in reverse, all these sorts of things, and just
complicates all of these stories about, about the, and that’s always where I get most
excited. And kind of break apart these stories and starting with the, you know, the
one that I've spent most of my time fighting against whole sort of the scientific
revolution, miraculous birth of modern science. And so when you've got figures
like Kepler, who, who is the easiest because he still is in many ways a Neo-
Platonist and kinda... But you can fully situate him within this and say...So the,
the, the one article I've been trying to get published—which again, as is often the
case with my work keeps getting stopped by these historians of mathematics who
don't like this idea— where does Kepler's idea of a physical cosmos emerge, the
idea that leads to his astrophysics and laws of planetary motion? This article tries
to argue that he may have been shaped by watching turners on the lathe and that
combination of mechanical-mathematical determinism with what they talked
about—there's a whole turners’ literature, you know, like poems and celebration of
the term, whatever—they all associate themselves with a geometer God who is
making the world, but making the world not through deterministic geometry alone,
but through that artistic hand, that brilliant hand, who knows when to shape, when
to push hard or soft or whatever within the mechanical turning and that the world is
this combination of geometric determinism but also artistic, willful artistry uh, that
sense.
Elijah Wallace: Which is, that's amazing, hearing that as a medievalist, ‘cause that
immediately brings to mind, you know, illuminations of, you know, God or Jesus
as who, you know, with the, uh, square or on the potter’s wheel.
J.B. Shank: Exactly. You can pull this up, ok? But you, you'll know what I'm
talking about. That famous one, it's from a, like a 12th century God, you know,
leaning over and he's got his compass. If you look at that closely as I have, he's, it's
a, it's an unformed mass down below there. He's got his compass on it, but his
other hand, he's turning it. And this is exactly the idea that I'm working with of the
compass as not an abstract notion of geometric reason alone, it is that too, but as an
actual tool. And if you, you know, if you actually read Euclidean geometry, you
know, the actual guy and the actual books, they're always talking about “draw this
line, cut this thing.”
In fact, geometry for many, many people is a kind of mechanical art. Um, and this
needs to be brought front and center. If you start thinking this way, then this whole
notion of where mathematical physics comes from, comes out of artisanal practices
as much as some sort of birth of pure, rational genius.
Elijah Wallace: And that's, uh, that's amazing to think about. So we've really gone
from the object because I think so often, and I think. I don't know whether this is,
you know, someone, as someone outside of the field. But the impression I get, it
often feels like, uh, you know, a pedigree of these, you know, it's a line of
intellectual descent and it's just thinking on thinking and that there is no material
connection. It's just, you know, this battle of ideas that results in this, you know,
Hegelian synthesis at the end and we have, you know, modern, modern
experimental science.
J.B. Shank: And, uh, embedded with this, this idea of a supersessionist,
progressive story where, not only is it thinking upon thinking, but it's also this idea
of the birth one day of people who just said, “Ah, let's do science” and, and, and
immediately have this whole new attitude, all these things. That attitude, that
understanding of what science is, is absolutely a mid-20th century idea that was
then retrospectively read back into—and the story of the Scientific Revolution is
just an origin story for modern western science as it was understood in the 1950s
and then the construction of a historiography.
And the, the sad part is that as clear as that is and as many things that are out there
where you can read this—like one of my favorite books, I always cite, I have
several articles where I've stolen this opening, is this book by Steven Shapin called
The Scientific Revolution that opens with the sentence, “There was no such thing as
the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it”, right? So I have numerous
articles that have some version of this in the title and yet despite all that, despite
the way everyone now will say, “We don't work that way anymore,” in the wider
public or among the scholars who read and don't like my work, that still remains
this powerful kind of myth, myth history. And that's what animates a lot of what I
do is try to find these cases that just complicate that and that show a much more,
um, first of all, just, just not necessarily supersessionist, progressive or stadial. It
might just be that there was this very particular set of things that converged around
1640 that were ivory turning and rather than worrying about how is this proto-
modern or proto-science or proto this, you say, “Well, that's the wrong question to
ask.”
Elijah Wallace: Exactly.
J.B. Shank: And those are— if those are the only questions we're supposed to be
asking, when you say, “I don't wanna ask that question, I want you to think about
this question instead”, you get into conflicts, you get the battles.
[00:36:19] Elijah Wallace: So leading into, uh, sort of wrap up, I have... So two
more questions on this and then we'll do the, uh, the outro question. First of all,
well actually one is a practical question and one is sort of a more thought
experiment.
But if you could, is there anything that you wanna know from the makers of these
objects that isn't apparent from the manuals or any of the primary sources?
J.B. Shank: Well there aren’t any manuals, so that's one.
Elijah Wallace: Well, not manuals, but the odes.
J.B. Shank: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. No, I mean, yes. I mean, um, take Kepler,
that's the one I've sort of fixated on because the wedge into the history of science
literature— which is what I wanna do, make that wedge, that intervention— is
through the canonical figures and Kepler's a canonical figure. And there's no
shortage of moments in his writings where he talks about what he's doing in ways
that rightly— in the same way, his predecessor Tycho Brahe, right. Certainly it's,
it's not wrong, it's not an error, it's not like the old historiography made this all up.
But what they did is take certain statements and read them separate from the other
statements and produce a picture of who these people are and what they're doing
that makes them look like modern scientists. And Kepler in particular had lots to
say about mathematics that maybe would've said to me, if I could go meet Kepler
and say, “Do you think that what those turners are doing over there is also
mathematics? Is there a kind of way in which what you're doing and what they're
doing can be seen as common and that you're actually in dialogue with them and
things like this.” I would be thrilled to hear his answer. And it, and, and I'm open to
the answer both sides. He might actually say, “What? No, they're, they're artists.
They're turners. I'm a mathematician. I'm no.” Yeah, there's this analogy, right? We
both are interested in the Platonic solids, and this is, you know, what a, what a
modern, hardcore, old fashioned historian science would say is, “Well yes, the
analogy.” They would also say, “The artist wanted to be like Kepler because they
all wanted to sort of get his scientific cred” and all that kind of stuff.
Well, no, in Kepler's day, the mathematician was a very low status point, right.
And um, and he only came into Rudolph's court as Tycho did because they could
do astrology and that's what they, you know, they wanted. But to be a
mathematician was to be a kind of artistan mechanic where whereas, so they're on
the same plane and that's just.. But the turner, these are exalted, elevated people
whose pensions are much bigger and who are seen in the court as so. And then
similarly, what the turners who use this language about neo-Platonic geometry, and
I mean, they, they call themselves, um, you know, they'll, they'll put into the odes
things, you know, “Like Plato said, geometry is the key to all knowledge. God is a
geometer, all these sorts of things, we're doing this.” To what extent did they see
what they were doing as in fact that, or was it just a kind of poetic rhetoric or who
thinks this way? So, and there aren’t smoking gun kind of documents or sources to
do this. And if there were, then the historiography might not be what it is, but
they’re aren't and since they're not there, I've gotta do all this hermeneutic work
and all this work to try to make it do. So, if you say like, thought experiment,
fantasy, if I could go back in time, that's what I'd want. I'd want to go to one of
these courts and I'd wanna talk to the turner and I'd go to the court of Rudolph II
about 1600, and I’d talk to Kepler and I’d talk to Ludwig von Lücke and, uh, these
turners that are there and I wanna see how they were and were not connected to
one another.
Elijah Wallace: Um, how is this phenomenon in specifically central Europe,
connected to this wider Atlantic story?
[00:40:34] J.B. Shank: No, it's, um, obviously a question I started asking very
early on and is even more, um, understudied ironically than the other stuff in the
sense that there's this large literature on the ivory trade as it emerges in the 18th
century, and is connected to European, the European conquest of Africa and the,
the incorporation of the ivory trade into that European, um, system. But, you would
think that it would stretch back into earlier times. But even trying to find, and then
similarly—like there's been all kinds of work on the material culture, you know,
Jan de Vries on the industrial society, all this stuff about just the exchange of
things. Um, I, it's funny that this has come up because I keep thinking, I think...
Okay. Klaus Maurice, I think is the name. We'll get the name of this book, but I
kept wanting to say Klaus Weber and I know it's not Klaus Weber. Klaus Weber is
this really interesting economic historian in Germany that I did a joint class with. It
was connected to the centers, actually, uh, to Matthias Welte in German who did
this. Klaus Weber is doing this, uh, really fascinating global history of Central
Europe. And things he notes are the fact that in the heart of Central Europe there is,
um, a spice cake that is seen as the most German of German holiday spice cakes
where the spices come from, uh, the east, right? So it just shows that even in the
heartland, not a place of ports and ships and things, you get these Asian products.
And clearly that's where the ivory's coming from. Now here, the thing that also has
to be asked, and nobody really does this, ivory itself is not necessarily a cut and
dry object. So, um, we immediately think elephant tusks. It seems pretty clear that
elephant tusks, um, are a key source, but there are also, um, you can also call
narwhal tusks ivory, walrus tusks, which are very present in like Greenland and
North and, and, and also going into Alaska today. There I, I fell into this really
interesting debate going on where, you know what peoples have this, uh, long
tradition of ivory sculpture and they do it with walrus tusks and in a way that many
say is environmentally sustainable. But since the wider global idea of ivory and
ivory trade and ivory art is that it's always horrific and bad, they've had to fight
with international environmental groups to get exemptions of their use of walrus
tusks to maintain their, their culture, right, in this way. So that made me open up.
And then, and then you go onto also bones. Human bones can be of a certain sort
and other bones, animal bones can be turned into a kind of ivory. Now what I'm
sure is the case is that if you, this would be something to talk to one of these ivory
turners, that they would've known the provenance of their sourced ivory, probably
had attitudes about um, which was better or worse, but were also adapting to what
was available. Um, and then you, you know, add, um, elephants, but also
rhinoceroses with their tusks as well. Long and the short of it is, and I've talked to
people who work on the ivory trade. They all say, “Well, I don't really know about
before 1800.” But the sort of, the big question is how much of it is, um, indigenous
European? I mean, how much of it is coming from forms of ivory that are available
in Europe and how much of it is coming from elsewhere?
Elijah Wallace: And, I've even seen things with some of that medieval, uh ivory
being like, like you said, narwhal and walrus that was brought by the Norse from
Greenland and, uh. That's, it’s, there's— I mean, there are so many more questions.
Basically, this is an amazing topic and I can definitely see how it branches off into
all these things and how you can sort of use these turned objects as a of talking
about the , the whole history of the, the Scientific Revolution and the
Enlightenment. So it's, it's amazing that you could. So especially I could see the
potential of talking to students about, about this.
J.B. Shank: Yeah. And, and other scholars. I mean, I think that's what's most
exciting about it, is that the visual objects that are readily available, anybody can
go see them, and yet you then start with basic questions. “What are these? Where
do they come?” Whatever. There's such little scholarship that you, you both are
frustrated by that, or I'm frustrated by that, but in a way it's a huge opportunity
because no one can really question you because it's not like you're, you're fighting
against an established scholarship. It's like free.
Elijah Wallace: Yeah.
Karen Soto: This has been “I’ve Got a Thing” from the Center of Premodern
Studies at the University of Minnesota- Twin Cities. If you’re interested in
supporting the Center, please visit our website at cla.umn.edu/premodern. Our
featured music is “Dangerous Diamonds” by Rogue Valley, written by Chris Koza,
and “Summer is icumen in" by Anya Badaldavood.