Lucia Raggetti:
Street Science and Affordable Art:
the Knowledge of Nature and its Properties in the Arabo-Islamic Mediaeval Tradition

Artworks and luxury objects produced for the elite often generated a widespread interest that extended to broader social strata. In response, artists and craftsmen developed ways to adapt these coveted works into more accessible and affordable forms for popular audiences. To achieve this, they drew on a deep and practical knowledge of nature and its properties.

The experts who made their living in this way, in fact, worked with inexpensive and readily available materials, designing devices meant for a large and relatively quick fruition. Their knowledge looked at nature from a different angle, certainly not from a lower step, a real ‘Street science’.

The example of automata is particularly telling: while these complex and refined devices were likely intended for courtly settings and enjoyed by elites, they also found popular echoes in figurines animated by various means—natural magnet, pulleys, animals, or steam. Sources about entertainment and deception, in fact, share many interests with the more erudite scientific tradition, a pattern also observed in parallel cultural contexts of the same period.

This presentation offers a survey of such objects as described in medieval Arabic sources. Through an interdisciplinary methodology, it becomes possible to reconstruct the specific knowledge systems employed to skillfully manipulate natural phenomena and human perception, while also exploring the social contexts in which these objects were produced, received, and used.

Lucia Raggetti is Professor of History of Arabic and Islamic Science at the University of Bologna. She is the author of Un coniglio nel turbante: Intrattenimento e inganno nella scienza arabo-islamica (Editrice Bibliografica, 2021), and ʿĪsā ibn ʿAlī's Book on the Useful Properties of Animal Parts Edition, translation and study of a fluid tradition (De Gruyter, 2018). Currently, she leads the ERC funded project “UseFool, Knowledge and manipulation of nature between usefulness and deception in the Arabo-Islamic tradition (9th-15th century).”