Gabriele Marcon, “The Boundaries of Knowledge: Books, Experts, and Readers in Early Modern Mines,” Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society, vol. 116, no. 1, (2025): 61-81.
The committee awards an honorable mention to Gabriele Marcon, for his article, “‘The Boundaries of Knowledge: Books, Experts, and Readers in Early Modern Mines,” Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society, vol. 116, no. 1, (2025): 61-81. Marcon’s article explores the interactions between scholarly administrators and skilled laborers in industrial projects of the 16th century. Using the mining operations of Montecerboli as a case study, this piece offers an essential contribution to our understanding of the mine as a workplace and the circulation of knowledge (or lack thereof) about the mining industry. What were the contributions and limitations of written works on mining? Were books enough to become an expert? Marcon proves they were not. Marcon shows how social, ethnic, and labor hierarchies shaped early modern mining and how skilled practitioners could maintain their privileged position in the face of the emergence of written treatises on mining.