Renaissance Goo: Senses and Materials in Early Modern Apothecary Taxonomies and Soft Matter Science

Abstract

This essay brings together research in the history of science and soft matter physics to consider how early modern Italian apothecaries organised and communicated their knowledge from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century through an “apothecary taxonomy.” This was based on a what we call a “hylocentric” classification scheme (from the Greek hyle = matter, material, stuff) founded on a tactile understanding of materials. We will investigate how the behaviour of medicines under deformation and flow – their “rheology” – is a previously underestimated organisational principle, and consider the specialist vocabulary these author-practitioners used to describe different liquid and liquid-like formulations. We will also suggest that the rheology of these formulations – which today falls under the domain of “soft matter science” – affected the material culture of apothecary shops, in the arrangement and selection of drug bottles and jars, which presented this knowledge visually to visitors and clients. That soft matter scientists organise the substances they study in similar ways to early modern apothecaries suggests the agency of materials in affecting human categorisations.