Pamela H. Smith is the Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University, founding Director of the Center for Science and Society, and principal investigator of the Making and Knowing Project. She is one of the most influential historians of early modern science working today, with major works including The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton, 1994), The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 2004), and From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World (2022). She received the Herzog August Bibliothek international prize for Cultural History and the History of Knowledge in 2023.

Smith's approach to alchemy is rooted in the history of material culture and artisanal knowledge. Her central argument — developed across multiple books and the Making and Knowing Project — is that early modern natural knowledge was produced not only through reading and reasoning but through bodily engagement with materials in workshops and laboratories. This materialist perspective reframes alchemy not as a pseudoscience or mystical pursuit but as a legitimate form of artisanal inquiry into the properties and transformations of matter.

Smith's engagement with the Atalanta Fugiens comes through her review in Medical History (2009) of Thomas Hofmeier's German translation and edition (Chymisches Cabinet, 2008), based on the 1708 German edition. She reads Maier's emblems not merely as symbolic puzzles but as representations of actual craft practices — smelting, distilling, washing, firing — that encode genuine chemical knowledge. The 1708 German edition's continued circulation demonstrates the work's practical relevance nearly a century after its original publication, evidence that it was consulted by working practitioners as well as intellectual adepts.

For this site, Smith's materialist perspective provides an essential counterpoint to purely textual and symbolic readings. Her emphasis on the practical, artisanal dimension of Maier's emblems enriches the discussion of emblems depicting specific craft processes — the washerwoman of Emblem III, the potter of Emblem XV, the steam bath of Emblem XXVIII — where the visual depiction of labor is not merely allegorical but draws on observable workshop practices. Her Making and Knowing Project at Columbia represents the most ambitious contemporary effort to reconstruct the kind of hands-on experimental knowledge that Maier both practiced and described.