Vera Keller
Biographic Data
| ID | 3683645 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Vera Keller |
| GIVEN NAMES | Vera |
| FAMILY NAME | Keller |
| SIGNATURE | KELLER V |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oregon |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9933-4590 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 25 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The Unnatural Trade
Projects in the History of Knowledge
The Panama Canal, the silkworm, a sugar plantation, the South Sea Bubble, an industrial workschool: they may seem to have little in common, but these, and other disparate interventions from around the globe, share a common epistemology relating knowledge and power in a specific dynamic: the project. A category new to the early modern period that still structures the world around us, the project offers tools for the critical and historical analysi…
Great Designs and Global Colonialism
This essay resituates “great designs” within the history of projecting by exploring how the schemes of Sir Balthazar Gerbier (1692–1633) interacted with what became known historiographically as the French Grand Dessein, the Dutch Groot Desseyn, and the English Western Design. Analyzed from the perspective of the history of knowledge, great designs are revealed to be risk-taking, uncertain, and constructed from fragments of disparate knowledges. P…
Entangling Knowledge and Ignorance
This review essays situates Alain Corbin's Terra Incognita: A History of Ignorance in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries within current discussions of knowledge and ignorance related to intellectual history, the history of science, and the history of knowledge. These varying approaches have drawn the borderland between knowledge and ignorance divergently. After a brief critique of the Corbin's positivist approach in Terra Incognita , I sketc…
Johann Daniel Major (1634–1693) and the experimental museum
In the late seventeenth century, Johann Daniel Major, professor of medicine at Kiel University, claimed to have founded a new discipline, the ‘tactica conclavium’ – that is, the study of arranging a collection. At times, scholars have characterized Major’s museology as a form of disordered polyhistorism. This essay emphasizes that the goal of the ‘tactica conclavium’ was experimental use. It situates Major’s interventions as an early example of a…
Happiness and Projects between London and Vienna
This essay situates Wilhelm Schröder's 1686 Princely Treasury and Exchequer (Fürstliche Schatzund Rent-Cammer) within the context of manufacturing projects in London and Vienna and debates over happiness they engaged. Conceptualizations of happiness have been seen as chief differences between Germanophone and Anglophone political economy. This comparison shows that Schröder was deeply engaged with English economic thought, particularly in the mil…
"A "Wild Swing to Phantsy
This essay traces the changing relationship between horticulture, agriculture, and philosophy across the seventeenth century, as the personae of the philosophical husbandman and the philosophical gardener intertwined and competed. At stake in the dynamics between them was the relationship between abstruse researches and practical applications in evolving experimental philosophy, as well as the aesthetic of experimental practices and rhetoric. Ear…
Into the Unknown
This essay argues for integrating the history of ignorance into the history of knowledge. Through a case study of the (failed) project of colonial Virginian sericulture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it explores the entanglement of various forms of knowledge and ignorance. These comprise forms of knowledge that have been presented as certain, such as clues and rules, and empirical, such as observations and questionnaires. They also …
The Empirical Empire
Deprogramming Baconianism
The historiographical construct of the ‘Baconian programme’ rose to prominence in the mid-twentieth century. It has since shaped views of Bacon and his followers, particularly concerning Bacon's utilitarianism. It has also set expectations concerning how defined and prescriptive Bacon's vision of the future ought to be for later Baconians. Yet, neither Bacon nor those who claimed to follow him thought of his work in programmatic ways. The early m…
Storied Objects, Scientific Objects, and Renaissance Experiment
The career of storied objects can help highlight the agency of absence and historicize the notion of scientific objects more generally. Until the sixteenth century, lost, ancient flexible glass was studied separately from malleable glass. The latter appeared as a claimed chymical product and craft recipe. The bridging of social and epistemic registers merged these accounts. Malleable glass became a prestigious scientific object. Appearing in nume…
Towards a History of Projects
This introduction argues for the value of projecting as a category of analysis, while exploring the contexts for its emergence and spread as a genre of intellectual and practical activity in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. The emergence of the morally ambivalent figure of the “projector” in Elizabethan and Stuart England – initially in connection with confessional strife and attacks on corruption, and subsequently in relatio…
Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575–1725
Many studies relate modern science to modern political and economic thought. Using one shift in order to explain the other, however, has begged the question of modernity's origins. New scientific and political reasoning emerged simultaneously as controversial forms of probabilistic reasoning. Neither could ground the other. They both rejected logical systems in favor of shifting, incomplete, and human-oriented forms of knowledge which did not mee…
Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575-1725
From the Archives of Scientific Diplomacy
Many historians have traced the accumulation of scientific archives via communication networks. Engines for communication in early modernity have included trade, the extrapolitical Republic of Letters, religious enthusiasm, and the centralization of large emerging information states. The communication between Samuel Hartlib, John Dury, Duke Friedrich III of Gottorf-Holstein, and his key agent in England, Frederick Clodius, points to a less obviou…
Introduction
The nature of invention in early modern Europe was decidedly fluid. Over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the broad streams of invention bore along many ancient meanings of the word, while
Nero and the Last Stalk of Silphion
Many studies of early modern natural history focus upon observational, empirical techniques. Early moderns also contended with entities which could no longer be observed because they no longer existed. Although it is often assumed that extinction only emerged as a concept in the eighteenth century, the concept of natural loss appeared, often unproblematically, in areas outside natural philosophy. A survey of discussions of the extinct plant silph…
Air Conditioning Jahangir
An exploration of an unfulfilled 1622 English global project offers an anthropology of early modern global economic thought. The design included the air conditioning of the Mughal court, piracy, and a submarine treasure-hunting industry. A seemingly Orientalist or colonial attempt to Anglicize India, the design, in fact, aimed to globalize England by drawing on new views concerning the malleability of climate. Later colonialism cannot explain the…
"The "framing of a new world
Vera Keller, The “framing of a new world”: Sir Balthazar Gerbier's “Project for Establishing a New State in America,” ca. 1649, The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 1 (January 2013), pp. 147-176
The Centre of Nature
A large network of alchemical agents spread from the tiny, land-locked duchy of Saxe- Gotha-Altenburg outward across Europe. At its centre, Duke Friedrich I (1646–1691) meticulously documented his interactions with many alchemical personalities during the 1670s and 1680s. The story of one such personality illustrates the changing meanings of distant alchemical knowledge both to the inner circle of courtly alchemists and to a larger alchemical rep…
Mining Tacitus
A new political practice, the ‘reason of state’, informed the ends and practices of natural study in the late sixteenth century. Informed by the study of the Roman historian Tacitus, political writers gathered ‘secrets of empire’ from both history and travel. Following the economic reorientation of ‘reason of state’ by Giovanni Botero (1544–1617), such secrets came to include bodies of useful particulars concerning nature and art collected by an …
Accounting for Invention
In the late sixteenth century, the Paduan legal humanist Guido Pancirolli wrote what would become a best-selling comparison of ancient and modern worlds. Pancirolli framed lost ancient things as "debits" and new-found things as "credits" within the inventory of human advantages. Soon after, Francis Bacon and Jakob Bornitz deployed Pancirolli's temporal accounting for invention to develop a third category of things desired for the future. This sto…
"The "New World of Sciences
Lists foreground multiplicity: both of objects to be pursued and, for distant objects, of far-flung networks enabling their pursuit. The future-oriented or projective list stretches such networks not only around the world but forward through time. Research agendas are one kind of future-oriented, projective list. Sketching how such lists have functioned over time, from Francis Bacon's "The New World of Sciences, or Desiderata" to today's desidera…
The Social and Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution
Conflicting Duties
Jill Kraye and Maria Pia Donato, eds. Conflicting Duties: Science, Medicine and Religion in Rome, 1550–1750. Warburg Institute Colloquia 15. London: The Warburg Institute, 2009. xiv + 389 pp. index. append. illus. £50. ISBN: 978–0–85481–149–6. - Volume 64 Issue 1
"The "New World of Sciences
Lists foreground multiplicity: both of objects to be pursued and, for distant objects, of far-flung networks enabling their pursuit. The future-oriented or projective list stretches such networks not only around the world but forward through time. Research agendas are one kind of future-oriented, projective list. Sketching how such lists have functioned over time, from Francis Bacon's "The New World of Sciences, or Desiderata" to today's desidera…
"A "Wild Swing to Phantsy
This essay traces the changing relationship between horticulture, agriculture, and philosophy across the seventeenth century, as the personae of the philosophical husbandman and the philosophical gardener intertwined and competed. At stake in the dynamics between them was the relationship between abstruse researches and practical applications in evolving experimental philosophy, as well as the aesthetic of experimental practices and rhetoric. Ear…
Into the Unknown
This essay argues for integrating the history of ignorance into the history of knowledge. Through a case study of the (failed) project of colonial Virginian sericulture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it explores the entanglement of various forms of knowledge and ignorance. These comprise forms of knowledge that have been presented as certain, such as clues and rules, and empirical, such as observations and questionnaires. They also …
Towards a History of Projects
This introduction argues for the value of projecting as a category of analysis, while exploring the contexts for its emergence and spread as a genre of intellectual and practical activity in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. The emergence of the morally ambivalent figure of the “projector” in Elizabethan and Stuart England – initially in connection with confessional strife and attacks on corruption, and subsequently in relatio…
From the Archives of Scientific Diplomacy
Many historians have traced the accumulation of scientific archives via communication networks. Engines for communication in early modernity have included trade, the extrapolitical Republic of Letters, religious enthusiasm, and the centralization of large emerging information states. The communication between Samuel Hartlib, John Dury, Duke Friedrich III of Gottorf-Holstein, and his key agent in England, Frederick Clodius, points to a less obviou…
Mining Tacitus
A new political practice, the ‘reason of state’, informed the ends and practices of natural study in the late sixteenth century. Informed by the study of the Roman historian Tacitus, political writers gathered ‘secrets of empire’ from both history and travel. Following the economic reorientation of ‘reason of state’ by Giovanni Botero (1544–1617), such secrets came to include bodies of useful particulars concerning nature and art collected by an …
Storied Objects, Scientific Objects, and Renaissance Experiment
The career of storied objects can help highlight the agency of absence and historicize the notion of scientific objects more generally. Until the sixteenth century, lost, ancient flexible glass was studied separately from malleable glass. The latter appeared as a claimed chymical product and craft recipe. The bridging of social and epistemic registers merged these accounts. Malleable glass became a prestigious scientific object. Appearing in nume…
Nero and the Last Stalk of Silphion
Many studies of early modern natural history focus upon observational, empirical techniques. Early moderns also contended with entities which could no longer be observed because they no longer existed. Although it is often assumed that extinction only emerged as a concept in the eighteenth century, the concept of natural loss appeared, often unproblematically, in areas outside natural philosophy. A survey of discussions of the extinct plant silph…
Air Conditioning Jahangir
An exploration of an unfulfilled 1622 English global project offers an anthropology of early modern global economic thought. The design included the air conditioning of the Mughal court, piracy, and a submarine treasure-hunting industry. A seemingly Orientalist or colonial attempt to Anglicize India, the design, in fact, aimed to globalize England by drawing on new views concerning the malleability of climate. Later colonialism cannot explain the…
The Centre of Nature
A large network of alchemical agents spread from the tiny, land-locked duchy of Saxe- Gotha-Altenburg outward across Europe. At its centre, Duke Friedrich I (1646–1691) meticulously documented his interactions with many alchemical personalities during the 1670s and 1680s. The story of one such personality illustrates the changing meanings of distant alchemical knowledge both to the inner circle of courtly alchemists and to a larger alchemical rep…
Accounting for Invention
In the late sixteenth century, the Paduan legal humanist Guido Pancirolli wrote what would become a best-selling comparison of ancient and modern worlds. Pancirolli framed lost ancient things as "debits" and new-found things as "credits" within the inventory of human advantages. Soon after, Francis Bacon and Jakob Bornitz deployed Pancirolli's temporal accounting for invention to develop a third category of things desired for the future. This sto…
"Lover" and Early Modern Fandom
A look at 17th century fannish practices through the works of "lovers" (or "amateurs") who primarily focussed on ideas, practices, and entities rather than individuals
Drebbel's Living Instruments, Hartmann's Microcosm, and Libavius's Thelesmos
Historians of science long ago ousted a once-assumed mechanization of the world picture from its privileged place as an abrupt shift in the Scientific Revolution. On the one hand, Simon Schaffer has pointed out the continuation of non-mechanical entities in the Royal Society, and on the other, Daniel Garber has pointed out how Cartesian mechanics was not incommensurable with its predecessors. If there was no sudden flicking of a ‘gestalt switch’ …
The Social and Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution
Conflicting Duties
Jill Kraye and Maria Pia Donato, eds. Conflicting Duties: Science, Medicine and Religion in Rome, 1550–1750. Warburg Institute Colloquia 15. London: The Warburg Institute, 2009. xiv + 389 pp. index. append. illus. £50. ISBN: 978–0–85481–149–6. - Volume 64 Issue 1
"Lover" and Early Modern Fandom
A look at 17th century fannish practices through the works of "lovers" (or "amateurs") who primarily focussed on ideas, practices, and entities rather than individuals
The Centre of Nature
A large network of alchemical agents spread from the tiny, land-locked duchy of Saxe- Gotha-Altenburg outward across Europe. At its centre, Duke Friedrich I (1646–1691) meticulously documented his interactions with many alchemical personalities during the 1670s and 1680s. The story of one such personality illustrates the changing meanings of distant alchemical knowledge both to the inner circle of courtly alchemists and to a larger alchemical rep…
Mining Tacitus
A new political practice, the ‘reason of state’, informed the ends and practices of natural study in the late sixteenth century. Informed by the study of the Roman historian Tacitus, political writers gathered ‘secrets of empire’ from both history and travel. Following the economic reorientation of ‘reason of state’ by Giovanni Botero (1544–1617), such secrets came to include bodies of useful particulars concerning nature and art collected by an …
Accounting for Invention
In the late sixteenth century, the Paduan legal humanist Guido Pancirolli wrote what would become a best-selling comparison of ancient and modern worlds. Pancirolli framed lost ancient things as "debits" and new-found things as "credits" within the inventory of human advantages. Soon after, Francis Bacon and Jakob Bornitz deployed Pancirolli's temporal accounting for invention to develop a third category of things desired for the future. This sto…
"The "New World of Sciences
Lists foreground multiplicity: both of objects to be pursued and, for distant objects, of far-flung networks enabling their pursuit. The future-oriented or projective list stretches such networks not only around the world but forward through time. Research agendas are one kind of future-oriented, projective list. Sketching how such lists have functioned over time, from Francis Bacon's "The New World of Sciences, or Desiderata" to today's desidera…
Air Conditioning Jahangir
An exploration of an unfulfilled 1622 English global project offers an anthropology of early modern global economic thought. The design included the air conditioning of the Mughal court, piracy, and a submarine treasure-hunting industry. A seemingly Orientalist or colonial attempt to Anglicize India, the design, in fact, aimed to globalize England by drawing on new views concerning the malleability of climate. Later colonialism cannot explain the…
"The "framing of a new world
Vera Keller, The “framing of a new world”: Sir Balthazar Gerbier's “Project for Establishing a New State in America,” ca. 1649, The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 1 (January 2013), pp. 147-176
Introduction
The nature of invention in early modern Europe was decidedly fluid. Over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the broad streams of invention bore along many ancient meanings of the word, while
Nero and the Last Stalk of Silphion
Many studies of early modern natural history focus upon observational, empirical techniques. Early moderns also contended with entities which could no longer be observed because they no longer existed. Although it is often assumed that extinction only emerged as a concept in the eighteenth century, the concept of natural loss appeared, often unproblematically, in areas outside natural philosophy. A survey of discussions of the extinct plant silph…
Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575–1725
Many studies relate modern science to modern political and economic thought. Using one shift in order to explain the other, however, has begged the question of modernity's origins. New scientific and political reasoning emerged simultaneously as controversial forms of probabilistic reasoning. Neither could ground the other. They both rejected logical systems in favor of shifting, incomplete, and human-oriented forms of knowledge which did not mee…
Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575-1725
From the Archives of Scientific Diplomacy
Many historians have traced the accumulation of scientific archives via communication networks. Engines for communication in early modernity have included trade, the extrapolitical Republic of Letters, religious enthusiasm, and the centralization of large emerging information states. The communication between Samuel Hartlib, John Dury, Duke Friedrich III of Gottorf-Holstein, and his key agent in England, Frederick Clodius, points to a less obviou…
Towards a History of Projects
This introduction argues for the value of projecting as a category of analysis, while exploring the contexts for its emergence and spread as a genre of intellectual and practical activity in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. The emergence of the morally ambivalent figure of the “projector” in Elizabethan and Stuart England – initially in connection with confessional strife and attacks on corruption, and subsequently in relatio…
Storied Objects, Scientific Objects, and Renaissance Experiment
The career of storied objects can help highlight the agency of absence and historicize the notion of scientific objects more generally. Until the sixteenth century, lost, ancient flexible glass was studied separately from malleable glass. The latter appeared as a claimed chymical product and craft recipe. The bridging of social and epistemic registers merged these accounts. Malleable glass became a prestigious scientific object. Appearing in nume…
Deprogramming Baconianism
The historiographical construct of the ‘Baconian programme’ rose to prominence in the mid-twentieth century. It has since shaped views of Bacon and his followers, particularly concerning Bacon's utilitarianism. It has also set expectations concerning how defined and prescriptive Bacon's vision of the future ought to be for later Baconians. Yet, neither Bacon nor those who claimed to follow him thought of his work in programmatic ways. The early m…
The Empirical Empire
Into the Unknown
This essay argues for integrating the history of ignorance into the history of knowledge. Through a case study of the (failed) project of colonial Virginian sericulture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it explores the entanglement of various forms of knowledge and ignorance. These comprise forms of knowledge that have been presented as certain, such as clues and rules, and empirical, such as observations and questionnaires. They also …
Johann Daniel Major (1634–1693) and the experimental museum
In the late seventeenth century, Johann Daniel Major, professor of medicine at Kiel University, claimed to have founded a new discipline, the ‘tactica conclavium’ – that is, the study of arranging a collection. At times, scholars have characterized Major’s museology as a form of disordered polyhistorism. This essay emphasizes that the goal of the ‘tactica conclavium’ was experimental use. It situates Major’s interventions as an early example of a…
Happiness and Projects between London and Vienna
This essay situates Wilhelm Schröder's 1686 Princely Treasury and Exchequer (Fürstliche Schatzund Rent-Cammer) within the context of manufacturing projects in London and Vienna and debates over happiness they engaged. Conceptualizations of happiness have been seen as chief differences between Germanophone and Anglophone political economy. This comparison shows that Schröder was deeply engaged with English economic thought, particularly in the mil…
"A "Wild Swing to Phantsy
This essay traces the changing relationship between horticulture, agriculture, and philosophy across the seventeenth century, as the personae of the philosophical husbandman and the philosophical gardener intertwined and competed. At stake in the dynamics between them was the relationship between abstruse researches and practical applications in evolving experimental philosophy, as well as the aesthetic of experimental practices and rhetoric. Ear…
Projects in the History of Knowledge
The Panama Canal, the silkworm, a sugar plantation, the South Sea Bubble, an industrial workschool: they may seem to have little in common, but these, and other disparate interventions from around the globe, share a common epistemology relating knowledge and power in a specific dynamic: the project. A category new to the early modern period that still structures the world around us, the project offers tools for the critical and historical analysi…
Great Designs and Global Colonialism
This essay resituates “great designs” within the history of projecting by exploring how the schemes of Sir Balthazar Gerbier (1692–1633) interacted with what became known historiographically as the French Grand Dessein, the Dutch Groot Desseyn, and the English Western Design. Analyzed from the perspective of the history of knowledge, great designs are revealed to be risk-taking, uncertain, and constructed from fragments of disparate knowledges. P…
Philosophy (17 works) · Epistemology (15 works) · Sociology (12 works) · History (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Politics (9 works) · Art (8 works) · History of Science and Medicine (8 works)