In this talk Valentina Puglian (University of Cambridge and Visiting Scholar with us this year in History and Philosophy of Science, Stanford) will introduce an important site of scientific discussion and experimentation of the European Renaissance that has received little attention so far: the pharmacy shop. Apothecaries were among the most numerous enthusiasts of natural history in early modern Europe. Yet, their involvement, like that of many artisans in science, has traditionally been considered tangential to the development of natural history’s polity and intellectual concerns.

Taking the case of Italy, she will argue otherwise: apothecaries not only provided crucial practical knowledge and brokering services for the running of natural history, but also contributed to spread its vogue and inflected the interests of its practitioners. Central to this dynamic was the pharmacy shop, at once a repository of naturalia, a testing room with useful equipment, and a meeting place for like-minded individuals interested in conversing about nature. Valentina will show how the average pharmacy could become a reference point for aspiring naturalists at the local level of the town; and, in turn, how this ‘shop natural history’ brings to light an urban science which, pursued in person and off paper, was the daily, informal counterpoint to the epistolary study of nature on which most scholarship has concentrated so far.