Subterranean worlds are often understood in terms of distinct categories: a natural environment and repository of resources, a world of extractive labour, or a space of invisible powers and the afterlife. These divisions, inherited from modern scholarly categories, tend to separate what early modern societies thought and governed jointly. The social sciences have recently proposed rethinking territories as volumetric configurations, made up of thicknesses and vertical circulations, where the top, bottom and underground are interdependent in the exercise of power.
This paper situates these debates historically through a specific case study: the Duchy of Savoy in the sixteenth century, showing how the subsoil became a space of government in its own right, where law, expertise, extraction and spiritual practices were articulated. The paper thus tests the idea that sovereignty is constructed not only at borders and on a horizontal plane, but also in depth, within a territory conceived in its three-dimensionality.
In the Duchy of Savoy, the years 1530–1532 marked a complete reorganisation of the governance of mineral resources, when Charles III gave mining an articulated form of state control. It was, however, the French occupation of 1536 that brought these issues into sharp relief: what happens to the governance of the underground when a territory is occupied and contested? Through ordinances, correspondence and conflicts, the subsoil then appears as a political laboratory, where the continuity of the state and the legitimacy of power are put to the test. In a context of wars perceived as times of panic, mines were not only a matter of economics or technology: they were also imbued with moral and religious imaginaries, where suspicions of heresy, occult knowledge, and acts of exorcism intersected. Thus, when Emmanuel-Philibert regained his states in 1559, he also had to reassert control over an invisible world and the powers that inhabited it: below the surface.
This paper is organised with the Maison française of Oxford.
Caroline Callard is a historian of the early modern period (sixteenth–seventeenth centuries), Directrice d’études at the EHESS (Paris) and a member of the Centre for the Study of the Social Sciences of Religion (CéSor). A specialist in the political and intellectual history of the Italian states (Le Prince et la république, 2007), she later turned to historical anthropology and the history of knowledge in early modern Western Europe, in the context of the religious crisis of the sixteenth century (Le Temps des fantômes, 2019, translated and revised in English as Spectrality in the Sixteenth Century, Oxford University Press, 2022). She is currently working on a book devoted to a history of the early modern underground, exploring mining environments, subterranean knowledge, and the sacred anthropologies of underground spaces (working title: Opening the Earth: an archaeology of extraction).
