2nd Special STIS online seminar: Johannes Mattes, In the Media Laboratory of Earth – Concepts of Knowledge and Space in Historical Cave Maps (1500-1800)
Please join us for the second (and last) special STIS online seminar of 2020. The seminar will be run online with Microsoft Teams on Monday the 7th of December from 15:00 to 16:00. You will find the link below. Johannes Mattes will speak for about 20 minutes on his research with good time for questions afterwards. Please note: Johannes also has kindly agreed to share a paper on the subject, which I am happy to circulate to those interested. Please do send me a quick email to Lukas.engelmann@ed.ac.uk if you would like to read the paper ahead of his presentation.
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Johannes Mattes, In the Media Laboratory of Earth – Concepts of Knowledge and Space in Historical Cave Maps (1500-1800)
Abstract: As places of a specific mediality and polyvalent imagery, caves were of interest for scholars, travelers as well as artists. Serving as a bridge between different cultures of knowledge, the underground, its observation and documentation functioned as a projection screen for the visitor’s claims of interpretation and possession. For scholars as Jacques Gaffarel, Athanasius Kircher or Johann Weichard Valvasor, who dedicated specific attention to the subterranean world, the difference between nature and culture was not so clear as it seems today. – A fact, which became particularly obvious in case of natural caves expanded by humans during Greek or Roman times. In this context, caves can be also recognized as so-called “boundary objects” (Star & Griesemer), connecting different communities of practice and meanings of various constituencies.
In particular, historical cave maps represent the contemporaries’ attempt to arrange and design the knowledge of the subterranean world as well as their inherent metadisciplinarity and aestheticism. Due to their specific format, repertoire of symbols and practices of survey, these plans can be identified as an own type of map, that should satisfy either scholarly, artistic or touristic needs. On the basis of a cultural-historical approach, the paper examines cave maps as a representation of a subterranean space, but in particular as a space of representation, where discourses on knowledge, architecture and the human body were visualized and various forms of scholarly cooperation were put in practice. The variety of maps, used for this study, includes both published and archive sources of scholars like Buondelmonti (1415), Leibniz (1749) or Buckland (1823) and belongs to caves in different parts of the world.
The author/presenter: Johannes Mattes is a postdoctoral scholar at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and lecturer at the Department of History at the University of Vienna. His two recent monographs “Reisen ins Unterirdische [Traveling in the underground]” (2015) and “Wissenskulturen des Subterranen [Cultures of subterranean knowledge]” (2019) deal with the scientific and cultural history of caves, speleology and the underground in general. Mattes was Visiting Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and Visiting Scholar at Stanford University (CA) and York University (Toronto). Since 2013 he is board member of the History of Earth Sciences Society (USA). Mattes’ current research examines the history of natural sciences in a cultural context, expeditions, scientific societies & academies, popular science, relationship between politics, research and the public. Since 2019, he is leading a research project on the history of (popular) scientific societies in Vienna and the Habsburg Empire throughout the 19th century. His contribution to STS includes studies on the formation of the scientific field of speleology as a metadisciplinary project, where both professionals and amateurs contribute, and the impact of practices and politics on discipline formation.