From Cicero to Kant, ingenuity has been a central concept in European understandings of intellectual capability, often in reference to ideas of inborn talent and quick-wittedness. Yet prior to the late eighteenth century, ingenuity (from the Latin ingenium) was rarely isolated as a cognitive ability, much less presumed a quality of uniquely gifted minds. This book, which stems from a 2017 conference organized by the Genius before Romanticism Project at the University of Cambridge, joins a small but growing collection of scholarship interested in the analytic possibilities of ingenium and its vernacular cognates as polyvalent actors’ terms. In contrast to word histories, however, the fifteen essays in Ingenuity in the Making explore what we might call the concept's spheres of action during the early modern period: the book approaches ingenuity from the perspective of makers and practitioners at work. What emerges is ingenuity's intimate and distinctive connection to materials and making.

In the introduction, the editors allude to the kind of nuance the book strives to achieve with its focus on artisanal practices––a topic that has long encouraged collaborations between historians of art and science. “Across early modern Europe contemporaries both lauded and reviled makers, their abilities, and even certain materials as ‘ingenious.’” Ingenuity “united experience” of all three of these areas, “but also allowed for distinctions to be made between qualities proper to each.” As an early modern keyword or “conceptual idiom,” ingenuity lies in how it presses us to “[bind] our categories of analysis more tightly to the contours of past experience” (1).

The book is divided into three sections. Part 1 groups chapters around the topic of nature's vital powers and the related belief that matter was capable of its own making. Since the Middle Ages, as Jennifer Rampling discusses in the first essay, alchemists had articulated this as itself a form of ingenuity, something that turned out to be crucial for seeing nature as a collaborator. Fascination with matter's ingenious animacy, however, prevailed in other contexts as well. Doina-Cristina Rusu and Michael Bycroft trace it in Bacon and Boyle respectively, while Andrés Vélez Posada subtly analyzes its presence in Handsteine to recuperate views of ingenuity as an environmental framework. As Posada shows, these stunning cabinet pieces connected the craft of miners to the generative forces of the local earths they labored. Binding them was a geological discourse of ingenuity catered to the needs of extractive states, which used it, among other things, for distinguishing ores.

Part 2 turns to questions of labor and technique and opens with Tina Asmussen's inspiring reading of German mining sites as “workscapes.” While ingenuity here takes on a moral role with religious and social meaning––it enabled miners to see their toil as a spiritual response to nature's powers––Hannah Murphy's essay on calligraphy illuminates the collective valuing of embodied skill in pedagogical contexts: ingenuity as something learnable. Other chapters, on anatomy and theories of art and craft, similarly use their analysis to nuance narratives about the codification of the social dimensions of artisanal practice, certainly one of the merits of the section as a whole.

Finally, part 3, on makers, shifts attention to aspects of display and to the communicative or rhetorical functions of ingenuity. From Christina Neilson's compelling discussion of trickery and wonder as tools (rather than taboos) in religious sculptures with movable parts, we move through Denis Ribouillault's erudite chapter on ingenuity in gardens, to Vera Keller's essay on joking and deceit in Burggrav's Biolychnium. All offer insights on how pliable and yet binding ingenuity's language could be, stimulating culturally specific phenomenologies. It makes it all the more striking, though, that only the last two chapters, on American featherwork and on extra-European objects at Kunstkammern, gesture toward ingenuity's cross-cultural valences. This is perhaps the volume's main shortcoming: its restrictive definition of European, which oversteps questions of imperialism, colonization, and their extractive economies, with which we know cultures of ingenuity were intimately connected. One cannot but think of the sugar mills and, by extension, plantations, known in early modern Spanish as ingenios. Still, this is a superb collection packed with original insights. It marks a turning point in studies of a truly central early modern term.