History of Science Society Annual Meeting 2025

Description

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.

Period	14 Nov 2025
Event type	Conference
Location	New Orleans, United StatesShow on map