Lecture with IHC’s 2024 Visiting Scholar Lavinia Maddaluno, on the socio-economic, cultural, scientific, technological, and medical responses to the expansion of rice cultivation in northern Italy.

Rice: ersatz, cultural artifact, object of knowledge, unruly crop

A dietary mainstay in non-European societies and a cornerstone of dishes like Northern Italian risotto, rice has diverse culinary significance. However, the timing of its introduction to Northern Italy remains unclear. Examining this event offers insights into the process of integrating new crops into both diet and cultural imagination. This talk is about the socio-economic, cultural, scientific, technological, and medical responses to the expansion of rice cultivation in northern Italy between the sixteenth and the eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries. Bringing together the history of knowledge and environmental history, in this talk I will reflect on how rice was appropriated by several actors, and on how these appropriations were intertwined with perceptions and constructions of the landscape and material environment. By interlacing narratives of rice cultivation and of the landscapes rice forms, alongside discussions of infrastructural development and knowledge systems, I will also delineate the progression of interactions between humans and their environments, as well as the evolution of water management practices, scientific advancements, medical understandings, and political-economic ideologies across different historical periods. Additionally, the talk will highlight how resources were conceptualized in the early modern period, reconnecting to contemporary debates on the Anthropocene and on the agency of non-humans.

About IHC’s 2024 Visiting Scholar:
Lavinia Maddaluno is Assistant Professor in early modern history at the Department of Humanities at Ca’ Foscari, Venice, working on David Gentilcore’s ERC project The Water Cultures of Italy 1500-1900. She is a historian of science interested in exploring the nexus between humans, nature and economy in early modern Europe. Lavinia has just completed her first monograph Science and political Economy in Enlightenment Milan (1760-1805), forthcoming with the Voltaire Foundation in autumn 2024. She is currently editing a book on rice in the Mediterranean with Rachele Scuro and a special issue on Water Knowledge with Giacomo Savani and Davide Martino. Lavinia has held multiple fellowships since the end of her PhD (Cambridge UK, 2018), from a Rome Fellowship at the British School at Rome, to a Max Weber Fellowship at the EUI and a joint Warburg/I Tatti Fellowship in the History of Science. More recently, she has been Fellow at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme and the Fondazione Einaudi, working on a new project on rice-related knowledge networks between France and Italy in the Enlightenment.

Attendance is free.

Meeting organised by the VINCULUM project with the aim to discuss topics at the confluence of History and Archival Science, with a particular focus on archives and historic houses.

History and Archival Science:

common issues in the construction of complex knowledge

On 19 and 20 July, Palácio Fronteira (Lisbon) will host the meeting History and Archival Science: common issues in the construction of complex knowledge, organised by the VINCULUM project. The aim of this event is to discuss topics at the confluence of History and Archival Science, with a particular focus on archives and historic houses.

The meeting will bring together national and international researchers, as well as organisations linked to tourism and cultural and archival heritage. Session 1, on the first day, will be dedicated to the study of archives as integrating institutions and enablers of a History in process. On the second day, Session 2 will discuss family archives and historic houses, analysing the importance of maintaining, preserving and promoting family archives, whether public or private. In this context, historic houses are also particularly important, not only because they shelter many of these archives, but also due to their valuable role in promoting tourism and the preservation of cultural heritage.

Keynote: Eric Ketelaar, Emeritus Professor of Archivistics at the University of Amsterdam

>> Programme (PDF, in Portuguese) <<

Research seminar with IHC’s 2024 Visiting Scholar Lavinia Maddaluno, on a case of hydraulic intervention in rural areas of northern Italy.

Perpetuating private property:

machines and hydraulics at the time of the Enlightenment

This paper considers a case of hydraulic intervention in some rural areas of the Duchy of Milan under Joseph II (1780s). It explores how practical and philosophical considerations shaped improvement projects, and how these intersected with the consolidation of private property, and an increase in productivity. More specifically, the paper reconstructs the not well-known case of the hydraulic pump made by the idraulico (expert in hydraulics) Carlo Castelli to reclaim lands in the northern-eastern areas of Lake Como. However, this paper is not only about a local project of land reclamation, rather also dealing with the function of material artefacts in revealing contemporary attitudes towards technology, natural and social order. How did institutions and naturalists conceive technical intervention on nature? Which were the political economic connotations of the practice of emulation of techniques? And how did institutions and experts in hydraulics philosophically address technical failure and errors at the time of the Enlightenment? Despite receiving governmental investments and support to build his machine, Castelli failed at his project of land-reclamation. The paper will thus also use this case study to reconsider the public and social role of technology itself, as well as of emulation at the time of enlightened reforms.

Comments by Ricardo Noronha and José Miguel Ferreira (IHC — NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST).

About IHC’s 2024 Visiting Scholar:
Lavinia Maddaluno is Assistant Professor in early modern history at the Department of Humanities at Ca’ Foscari, Venice, working on David Gentilcore’s ERC project The Water Cultures of Italy 1500-1900. She is a historian of science interested in exploring the nexus between humans, nature and economy in early modern Europe. Lavinia has just completed her first monograph Science and political Economy in Enlightenment Milan (1760-1805), forthcoming with the Voltaire Foundation in autumn 2024. She is currently editing a book on rice in the Mediterranean with Rachele Scuro and a special issue on Water Knowledge with Giacomo Savani and Davide Martino. Lavinia has held multiple fellowships since the end of her PhD (Cambridge UK, 2018), from a Rome Fellowship at the British School at Rome, to a Max Weber Fellowship at the EUI and a joint Warburg/I Tatti Fellowship in the History of Science. More recently, she has been Fellow at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme and the Fondazione Einaudi, working on a new project on rice-related knowledge networks between France and Italy in the Enlightenment.

The seminar requires prior registration by 17 July via miguelcarmo@fcsh.unl.pt.
Registrants will receive a chapter from the author’s book (to be published after the summer) on which the seminar discussion will focus. For a presentation of the book, see this link.