This lecture focuses on the notion of modernity, as conceptualised by European scholars in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, through the lens of material and visual culture in everyday life. It first argues that the rhetoric of modernity relied on science and technology, in particular on the role they played in making European colonial projects possible. It then proceeds to examine how such rhetoric spread across the European elites through scientific texts, toys, and educational pastimes that normalised notions of European dominance over the world.
Speaker:
Paola Bertucci is a professor in the Department of History and in the History of Science and Medicine Program at Yale University. Her research focuses on science, technology, and medicine in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, mostly in Europe. She is the author of Artisanal Enlightenment:Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (Yale University Press, 2017), which looks at the Enlightenment from the perspective of learned artisans and argues for the centrality of the mechanical arts in French colonial and commercial projects. Artisanal Enlightenment was awarded the 2019 Louis Gottschalk from ASECS. Her most recent book, In the Land of Marvels. Science, Fabricated Realities, and Industrial Espionage in the Age of the Grand Tour (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023) examines the relationship between eighteenth-century science and information cultures through the lens a medical controversy and its life on the printed page. In the Land of Marvels received the 2025 Paul Bunge prize for best book on the history of scientific instruments. She is the president of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.