Sebastian Felten
Biographic Data
| ID | 1107558 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sebastian Felten |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sebastian |
| FAMILY NAME | Felten |
| SIGNATURE | FELTEN S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Vienna |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8194-4112 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 9 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Beyond National Currency: The Plurality of Early Modern Money
Diversity in money leaps at historians of early modern societies, whether they analyse account books, legal documents, travelogues and diaries, or try to make sense of a sum casually mentioned in a source from the period. The plurality of money objects contrasts with the homogeneous, singular currencies imposed by nation‐states in the 19th and 20th centuries. Surveying classic and recent scholarship, this article encourages historians to look bey…
The Pen at Work: Codifying Mining Techniques in Central Europe (ca. 1750-1820)
Historians of science consider eighteenth-century codifications of mining knowledge as precursors of modern technoscience. The present article uses technician-scientist Abraham Gottlob Werner’s codification of hard-rock mining techniques as a starting point to address three questions: How were labour processes translated into a knowledge structure? What was lost (or captured) in the process of textualization? And what purpose did codification ser…
Managing Mineral Growth in Early Modern Mining
This essay explores how the analogy between vegetable, animal, and mineral growth—common in early modern Europe—informed economic thinking. It proceeds by analyzing a scholarly text emerging from Central European mining, the Berg-Chronica of the Saxon court historiographer Petrus Albinus, within two contexts: natural philosophy (both learned and vernacular) and the management of mines. The provision of precious and useful metals by Nature/God was…
Money Supplies
From the spread of silver as commodity money in the early modern world to mass-produced national currency in the nineteenth century, coins had a dual nature. They supplied facts about the past when they were investigated by antiquarians, and they required knowledge of materials and their supply when used as currency. This essay explores a little-researched borderland between economic history and history of science: the work of assayers and mint o…
Early Modern Resources: An Introduction
Environmental and “Anthropocene” history have relied on a host of interconnected terms to describe human–nature interaction, including “economic growth,” “development,” “sustainability,” “environment,” and “resources.” These terms were shaped by post-1945 economic policy, bureaucracy, and science, are centered in Western experience of recent origin, and now convey twenty-first-century sensibilities. This situation leaves historians who work on ot…
Money in the Dutch Republic: Everyday Practice and Circuits of Exchange
Scaling the World: Allegory of Coinage and Monetary Governance in the Dutch Republic
Unboxed: Transgender in a Gay Museum
Unboxed: Transgender in a Gay Museum? (January 18–March 1, 2019, Schwules Museum Berlin) was a small exhibition that showed about 150 archival objects in two rooms of the Schwules Museum (SMU) at the beginning of 2019. The objects displayed were created by, or contained information about, trans-identified people, and for the most part (except for one loan from the Lili Elbe Archive for Trans, Inter, and Queer History Berlin) were taken from the S…
Sustainable Gains: Dutch Investment and Bureaucratic Rationality in Eighteenth-Century Saxon Mines
A late-eighteenth-century encounter between Dutch merchants and cameralist Saxon officials is used to argue two related points. First, the history of knowledge can help us rethink hierarchical power structures like the Saxon mining bureaucracy. Mine owners had a right to information and could not be forced to pay contributions, which meant that mining officials were solicitous in sharing knowledge, fretted about investors’ favor, and took their d…
Bureaucracy as Knowledge
In this introduction we explain the overall approach taken in this special issue. It is the collective result of a working group of historians who focus on very different periods and regions, such as the medieval Latin West, Spanish America, Qing China, and the Ottoman Empire. We show, firstly, how bureaucracy has worked as a term of critique and how, in fin-de-siècle Europe, it became an analytical concept used for world-historical comparison wi…
Mining culture, labour, and the state in early modern Saxony
This article encourages cultural historians to shift their attention from the ‘origins’ of early modern mining culture in manual labour to seemingly derivative contexts such as the court, bureaucracy, and heritage collections. How did these sites fashion the idea of mining culture as a system of expressions, and how was this system used, with varying success, to align individuals and groups with the requirements of material production? The articl…
The history of science and the history of bureaucratic knowledge: Saxon mining, circa 1770
This article looks into mining in central Germany in the late eighteenth century as one area of highly charged exchange between (specific manifestations of early modern) science and the (early modern) state. It describes bureaucratic knowledge as socially distributed cognition by following the steps of a high-ranking official that led him to discover a rich silver ore deposit. Although this involved hybridization of practical/artisanal and theore…
Die Zeit um 1670: Eine Wende in der europäischen Geschichte und Kultur
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Early Modern Resources: An Introduction
Environmental and “Anthropocene” history have relied on a host of interconnected terms to describe human–nature interaction, including “economic growth,” “development,” “sustainability,” “environment,” and “resources.” These terms were shaped by post-1945 economic policy, bureaucracy, and science, are centered in Western experience of recent origin, and now convey twenty-first-century sensibilities. This situation leaves historians who work on ot…
Managing Mineral Growth in Early Modern Mining
This essay explores how the analogy between vegetable, animal, and mineral growth—common in early modern Europe—informed economic thinking. It proceeds by analyzing a scholarly text emerging from Central European mining, the Berg-Chronica of the Saxon court historiographer Petrus Albinus, within two contexts: natural philosophy (both learned and vernacular) and the management of mines. The provision of precious and useful metals by Nature/God was…
The history of science and the history of bureaucratic knowledge: Saxon mining, circa 1770
This article looks into mining in central Germany in the late eighteenth century as one area of highly charged exchange between (specific manifestations of early modern) science and the (early modern) state. It describes bureaucratic knowledge as socially distributed cognition by following the steps of a high-ranking official that led him to discover a rich silver ore deposit. Although this involved hybridization of practical/artisanal and theore…
Die Zeit um 1670: Eine Wende in der europäischen Geschichte und Kultur
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The history of science and the history of bureaucratic knowledge: Saxon mining, circa 1770
This article looks into mining in central Germany in the late eighteenth century as one area of highly charged exchange between (specific manifestations of early modern) science and the (early modern) state. It describes bureaucratic knowledge as socially distributed cognition by following the steps of a high-ranking official that led him to discover a rich silver ore deposit. Although this involved hybridization of practical/artisanal and theore…
Sustainable Gains: Dutch Investment and Bureaucratic Rationality in Eighteenth-Century Saxon Mines
A late-eighteenth-century encounter between Dutch merchants and cameralist Saxon officials is used to argue two related points. First, the history of knowledge can help us rethink hierarchical power structures like the Saxon mining bureaucracy. Mine owners had a right to information and could not be forced to pay contributions, which meant that mining officials were solicitous in sharing knowledge, fretted about investors’ favor, and took their d…
Bureaucracy as Knowledge
In this introduction we explain the overall approach taken in this special issue. It is the collective result of a working group of historians who focus on very different periods and regions, such as the medieval Latin West, Spanish America, Qing China, and the Ottoman Empire. We show, firstly, how bureaucracy has worked as a term of critique and how, in fin-de-siècle Europe, it became an analytical concept used for world-historical comparison wi…
Mining culture, labour, and the state in early modern Saxony
This article encourages cultural historians to shift their attention from the ‘origins’ of early modern mining culture in manual labour to seemingly derivative contexts such as the court, bureaucracy, and heritage collections. How did these sites fashion the idea of mining culture as a system of expressions, and how was this system used, with varying success, to align individuals and groups with the requirements of material production? The articl…
Unboxed: Transgender in a Gay Museum
Unboxed: Transgender in a Gay Museum? (January 18–March 1, 2019, Schwules Museum Berlin) was a small exhibition that showed about 150 archival objects in two rooms of the Schwules Museum (SMU) at the beginning of 2019. The objects displayed were created by, or contained information about, trans-identified people, and for the most part (except for one loan from the Lili Elbe Archive for Trans, Inter, and Queer History Berlin) were taken from the S…
Money in the Dutch Republic: Everyday Practice and Circuits of Exchange
Scaling the World: Allegory of Coinage and Monetary Governance in the Dutch Republic
Managing Mineral Growth in Early Modern Mining
This essay explores how the analogy between vegetable, animal, and mineral growth—common in early modern Europe—informed economic thinking. It proceeds by analyzing a scholarly text emerging from Central European mining, the Berg-Chronica of the Saxon court historiographer Petrus Albinus, within two contexts: natural philosophy (both learned and vernacular) and the management of mines. The provision of precious and useful metals by Nature/God was…
Money Supplies
From the spread of silver as commodity money in the early modern world to mass-produced national currency in the nineteenth century, coins had a dual nature. They supplied facts about the past when they were investigated by antiquarians, and they required knowledge of materials and their supply when used as currency. This essay explores a little-researched borderland between economic history and history of science: the work of assayers and mint o…
Early Modern Resources: An Introduction
Environmental and “Anthropocene” history have relied on a host of interconnected terms to describe human–nature interaction, including “economic growth,” “development,” “sustainability,” “environment,” and “resources.” These terms were shaped by post-1945 economic policy, bureaucracy, and science, are centered in Western experience of recent origin, and now convey twenty-first-century sensibilities. This situation leaves historians who work on ot…
The Pen at Work: Codifying Mining Techniques in Central Europe (ca. 1750-1820)
Historians of science consider eighteenth-century codifications of mining knowledge as precursors of modern technoscience. The present article uses technician-scientist Abraham Gottlob Werner’s codification of hard-rock mining techniques as a starting point to address three questions: How were labour processes translated into a knowledge structure? What was lost (or captured) in the process of textualization? And what purpose did codification ser…
Beyond National Currency: The Plurality of Early Modern Money
Diversity in money leaps at historians of early modern societies, whether they analyse account books, legal documents, travelogues and diaries, or try to make sense of a sum casually mentioned in a source from the period. The plurality of money objects contrasts with the homogeneous, singular currencies imposed by nation‐states in the 19th and 20th centuries. Surveying classic and recent scholarship, this article encourages historians to look bey…
Sociology (8 works) · Historical Economic and Social Studies (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Bureaucracy (6 works) · History (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · History (5 works) · Archaeology (4 works) · Art (4 works)