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SUMMARY:Jewellers\, travellers and the classification of gems\, c. 1600–
 1800 - Michael Bycroft (University of Warwick)
DTSTART:20150302T130000Z
DTEND:20150302T141500Z
UID:TALK57290@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Margaret Carlyle
DESCRIPTION:Precious stones were widely studied by early modern naturalist
 s\, experimenters\, and natural philosophers in Europe. Yet historians of 
 early modern science have written much less about gems than they have abou
 t related kinds such as minerals\, fossils and crystals. In this talk I ar
 gue that the notion of 'pierre précieuse' had a meaningful role in minera
 l classification in France well into the eighteenth century. In other word
 s\, precious stones survived as a natural kind long after the decline of t
 he literary genre devoted to them (the lapidary). I go on to describe two 
 ways in which early modern mineral schemes reflected the interaction betwe
 en naturalists on the one hand and jewellers and travellers on the other. 
 Jewellers were partly responsible for the early modern shift from colour t
 o hardness as the dominant criterion for classifying minerals. And it was 
 in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that naturalists began to make
  systematic use of 'oriental' and 'occidental' as taxonomic terms for gems
 .
LOCATION:Seminar Room 1\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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