Abstract:

Cornelis Drebbel (1572-1633): Fame and the Making of Modernity The invention of the submarine, the discovery of a chemical scarlet dye, and the contrivance of a celebrated perpetual motion machine were just a few of Cornelis Drebbel's many projects. Yet besides his career as a projector in London and Prague, Drebbel also gained fame across Europe as a natural philosopher. The acceptance of Drebbel's claim to philosophical authority runs counter to current historiography. Shapin and Schaffer have suggested that the soberly rational gentleman distinguished himself as a philosopher from the foolish empiric, yet many authorities embraced Drebbel as an artisanal philosopher. Following the ways in which Drebbel's claims and accomplishments were used sheds light on the emerging public, on the culture of liefhebbers, and on the numerous ways in which enthusiasm played a vital role in this supposedly dry philosophical period.

This study devotes equal attention to Drebbel and to those who championed his authority. Political theorists such as Jakob Bornitz and Christoph Besold upheld the role of artisans in an age when a market connected producers and consumers. The consumer's appetite for novelty spurred innovation and could be channeled by the state for the recovery of lost arts and the invention of new ones. Desire, once a vice and always reason's foe, could point the way to a better future.

The desiring consumer or "lover" (liefhebber, liebhaber, amateur ) placed a high value on art and artisans. Lovers such as Joachim Morsius, Johann Ernst Burggrav, and Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc invested themselves in spreading Drebbel's fame. The example of someone who achieved the seemingly impossible supported the idea of man's limitless abilities.

The figure of the projector has never been entirely absent from historiography, but it has also never been fully integrated with the history of more canonical figures. Bacon, Boyle, Becher, and Leibniz were well aware of how the folly of empirics could further invention. Studies of long-canonized achievements obscure the utility of appetite and even folly in all seventeenth century discovery; Drebbel's story recoups the daring felt in his own time to mark a period of innovation, without rendering the idea of progress relentlessly rational or inevitable.