Studying early modern medico-legal testimonies can enrich our understanding of witnessing, the focus of much research in the history of science. Expert testimonies were well established in the Roman Canon law, but the sphere of competence of expert witnesses—one of the grounds on which seventeenth-century physicians claimed social and intellectual authority—troubled contemporary jurists. By reconstructing these debates in Counter Reformation Rome, and by placing in them the testimonies given by Paolo Zacchia, one of the founding fathers of legal medicine, this (...) article discusses the epistemological and social issues surrounding the definition of expertise about the body in court. It shows how a high-ranking expert witness would define his competence versus the legal authority on the one hand, and versus lay and lower-status expert witnesses on the other. But it also explores the interactions between specific legal constraints, for example about eye witnessing, and the ways in which different kinds of witnesses would use the body as a source of evidence for testimony. While engaging with medico-legal issues including the ambiguous signs of childbirth and the visibility of pain, the article examines their meanings within Counter Reformation social controversies, including control over sexuality, imposition of discipline and the social status of physicians.Author Keywords: Legal medicine; Seventeenth-century Rome; Expert witnesses; Testimony; Body; Zacchia. (shrink)

This article draws attention to several different practices of observation, manipulation, and experimentation with the surface of natural things. Beginning from the observation that the surfaces of natural things invited observation, manipulation, measurement, and re-configuration, with the promise to unveil the knowledge of depths, this article explores how practical knowledge about the surface of things and bodies led to new conceptions of nature and matter as composed of layers, corpuscles, and artificially reproducible solid parts in early modern Europe. This article (...) explores issues of knowledge production, and studies the ways in which material knowledge-making practices contributed to the habits of observing and experimenting with the surface of nature. By discussing three groups of cases in which nature was known by its surface and practice was mixed with theoretical appraisals of matter—surgeons, butchers, and food-cutters; gardeners and agronomists; and physicians—this article argues that “cognitive models” focusing on the description as well as the manipulation of natural surfaces informed both artisanal practices and natural philosophy, bridging the “high” and the “low” in the age of the “scientific revolution.”. (shrink)

A new political practice, the ‘reason of state’, informed the ends and practices of natural study in the late sixteenth century. Informed by the study of the Roman historian Tacitus, political writers gathered ‘secrets of empire’ from both history and travel. Following the economic reorientation of ‘reason of state’ by Giovanni Botero (1544–1617), such secrets came to include bodies of useful particulars concerning nature and art collected by an expanding personnel of intelligencers. A comparison between various writers describing wide-scale collections, (...) such as Botero, Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Jakob Bornitz (1560–1625) and Matthias Bernegger (1582–1640), reveals that seventeenth-century natural intelligencers across Europe not only were analogous to political intelligencers, but also were sometimes one and the same. Those seeking political prudence cast themselves as miners, prying precious particulars from the recesses of history, experience and disparate disciplines, including mathematics, alchemy and natural philosophy. The seventeenth-century practice of combining searches for secrets of empire, nature and art contests a frequent historiographical divide between empirical science and Tacitism or reason of state. It also points to the ways political cunning shaped the management of information for both politics and the study of nature and art. (shrink)