Transient Technologies: The Lost Practices of Early Modern Knowledge-Making

FAIN: FT-60250-12

Carol Pal
Bennington College (Bennington, VT 05201-6004)

"Transient Technologies" is the second half of a two-part project. The first part, a monograph entitled "Republic of Women," tells the story of an international network of female scholars in the seventeenth century, and establishes the fact that they constituted a well-known and well-respected component of early modern intellectual culture. This second project, then, attempts to answer the question that inevitably arises from the first - namely, how is it that these scholars and their work have faded almost completely from the narrative of intellectual history? The answer, in part, lies in the disappearance of the practices through which their work was accomplished: scribal publication, a process that produced texts while effacing authors; and the famille d'alliance, a constructed network of intellectual kinship outside the university. "Transient Technologies" reconstructs these lost practices, and in the process recovers the work of the men and women who employed them.