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Maker Space: Creative Environments in Early Modern Europe

Edited by Colin Murray, Edited by Sophie Pitman, Edited by Tianna Helena Uchacz

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This volume charts alternative courses through history via the physical conditions and artisanal ecologies in which cultural artifacts were created in Europe from roughly 1400 to 1700. Maker Space: Creative Environments in Early Modern Europe asks how spatial considerations initiated, supported, and thwarted creative activities and highlights points of intersection and overlap across practices that we otherwise tend to think of as separate. Scholars have long had an interest in, for instance, the workshop, laboratory, studiolo, or Kunstkammer as distinct places of productionâ€”named coordinates that situate social and technical actions in a defined context. The essays in this volume use the less fixed notion of space to break open such typologies, emphasizing the fluid, improvisational, and idiosyncratic aspects of creative work. They demonstrate how the ever-shifting array of tools, materials, environmental conditions, and bodies involved in artisanal production redirects our attention to the shared conditions that unite various enterprises of intellection, imagination, experimentation, and making. The book comprises a series of short case studies and extended meditations on particular sites where the work of the mind and hand coincided, from mines, arsenals, theaters, and imagined hermitages to tailorsâ€™ shops, artistsâ€™ workshops, the home, and even the space of a chemistâ€™s notebook. This format of short and long essays animates the story of early modern making and thinking practices at various scales. The specifics of these case studies move us away from either totalizing or categorical views that would gloss over the fluid, messy, and insistently material conditions of daily workâ€”that is, the raw material of history. These essays also suggest fundamental shared concernsâ€”from environmental and moral control to the conditions necessary for the mental demands of makingâ€”that supersede distinct makers or creative practices. Â