Early modern Europe is often identified as a period and place that witnessed key transformations in the nature of what counted as knowledge and the means by which this knowledge should be produced, disseminated, and adjudicated. These transformations comprised such shifts as a reevaluation of the role of deduction versus induction, an increased valuation of probabilistic reasoning and argumentation, a move from knowledge grounded in universal, generalized experiences to contrived experiment, and a relative devaluing of the textual methods of medieval university learning in favor of empirical methods associated with artisans, officials, and merchants. This narrative is well-established. Its contours have been refined by many generations of historians of knowledge production, who have approached these transformations using the tools of intellectual history, the history of philosophy, the history of science, the history of textual practices, the history of information, and so forth. What is less familiar is how scholars, craftsmen, and others at the time worked to navigate these emerging distinctions as they were confronted by them.

This panel offers new insight into this well-traversed arena of scholarship by highlighting how early modern actors juxtaposed methods and knowledge claims drawn from both traditional and novel approaches to natural knowledge. Abou-Nemeh’s study of Théophraste Renaudot’s conferences at the Bureau d’Adresse reveals the way a self-styled modernizer drew on genres of communication rooted in the ancient and medieval quaestio. By examining the questions and conjectures proposed by Renaudot’s conference participants, she explores how they were used as tools of inquiry and what they reveal about the ways in which early seventeenth-century Parisians grappled with uncertain knowledge. Raphael’s examination of Miguel Monsalve’s proposal for a new oven for refining mercury in Huancavelica (modern Peru) challenges an assumption often made by modern scholars, namely that early modern actors had a shared toolbox and set of methods that they applied both to the production and validation of knowledge claims. Through an analysis of Joseph Priestley’s 1765 Chart of Biography, Rosenberg considers the way uncertainty was approached, studied, and depicted in by eighteenth-century scholars in disciplines ranging from epistemology to mathematics to punctuation. Johns brings the story up to the invention of the modern scientific disciplines by looking at how the values and practices developed in those earlier periods fared when faced with demands for certainty about chemical substances in an age of imperialism and industry. For Andrew Ure, an unusually pugnacious champion of the new disciplines of political economy and chemical analysis, the question of authenticity turned out to be as central as ever, and an insistence on the public performance of scientific method meant that matters of personal integrity and honor, far from being supplanted, were as prominent as ever too.