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 numerous utopias, it stimulated a participatory public of scientific amateurs. Such storied objects served as vectors for spreading experimental culture, yet declined as new professions emerged. The charisma that made malleable glass a seventeenth-century scientific object led to its rejection by newly professionalized eighteenth-century chemists and its replacement by a less evocative scientific object, “malleability.”

The English word tiger has an uncertain etymology and a curious history of use. Probably first seen in Europe in the fourth century BCE, the tiger, by the early modern age, had acquired a long history of folkloric associations. This article examines early modern uses of the word tiger in the context of the period’s linguistic debates about natural and conventional meaning. It seeks to present a history in which the word, through use, develops closer (if not necessarily natural) associations with the qualities of its referent.

Equestrian ballet was a spectacular genre of musical theater popular in the Baroque court. A phenomenon with military roots, the ballet communicated both the might and grace of its organizers, who often played starring roles. This essay explores the ballet’s centrality by tracing the itinerant opera singer and writer Margherita Costa’s use of the genre as a means of securing elite patronage: from an elegant manuscript libretto presented to Grand Duke Ferdinando II de’ Medici and later revised in print for Cardinal Jules Mazarin in Paris, to occasional poetry written for the Barberini in Rome, and even burlesque caricatures.

The emergence of a positive attitude toward mountains is commonly regarded as an eighteenth-century phenomenon. The facts tell otherwise. Unearthing a number of hitherto-unknown sources, this article demonstrates that interest in and enthusiasm for mountains already began to evolve around 1500: from then on, mountains gained in importance in political, religious, and scientific discourses. Travel through mountainous regions increased, and people started to climb mountains. The interplay between theoretical interests and practical engagement led to a new emotional response, or what may be called mountain feeling, that anticipated the attitude of the eighteenth century and of the present.