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.