From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World

by Pamela H. Smith

Overview

How and why early modern European artisans began to record their knowledge.

In From Lived Experience to the Written Word, Pamela H. Smith considers how and why, beginning in 1400 CE, European craftspeople began to write down their making practices. Rather than simply passing along knowledge in the workshop, these literate artisans chose to publish handbooks, guides, treatises, tip sheets, graphs, and recipe books, sparking early technical writing and laying the groundwork for how we think about scientific knowledge today.
 
Focusing on metalworking from 1400-1800 CE, Smith looks at the nature of craft knowledge and skill, studying present—day and historical practices, objects, recipes, and artisanal manuals. From these sources, she considers how we can reconstruct centuries of largely lost knowledge. In doing so, she aims not only to unearth the techniques, material processes, and embodied experience of the past but also to gain insight into the lifeworld of artisans and their understandings of matter.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226818245
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	09/23/2022
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	8.75(w) x 9.50(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Pamela H. Smith is the Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University and founding director of the Center for Science and Society and of its cluster project, the Making and Knowing Project. She is the author of The Business of Alchemy and The Body of the Artisan, the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press. She is the co—editor of Ways of Making and Knowing and The Matter of Art and editor of Entangled Itineraries.
 

Table of Contents

Introduction: Lived Experience and the Written Word

Part 1: Vernacular Theorizing in Craft
1. Is Handwork Knowledge?
2. The Metalworker’s Philosophy
3. Thinking with Lizards

Part 2: Writing Down Experience
4. Artisan Authors
5. Writing Kunst
6. Recipes for Kunst

Part 3: Reading and Collecting
7. Who Read and Used Little Books of Art?
8. Kunst as Power: Making and Collecting

Part 4: Making and Knowing
9. Reconstructing Practical Knowledge: Hastening to Experience
10. A Vocabulary for Mind—Body Knowing

Epilogue: Global Routes of Practical Knowledge

Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Smith’s book is a generous invitation to explore the marvelous and surprising territory that is shared by the history of science and art history. It convincingly historicizes experiential knowledge of early modern practitioners and shows the way for other historians to do the same. Moreover, it presents a particularly strong argument for reclaiming 'art' or kunst, not as synonyms for 'fine' art, but as terms denoting the human ability and knowledge to transform and manipulate materials and nature. Aided by many full—color plates, this highly recommended book surely succeeds in resurrecting the lived artisanal experience from the past."

Isis

"In scholarship, it is a matter of course to interrogate the nature of a text by reading it. Reconstruction lets us explore the nature of practice by doing it. Smith’s book is all the more valuable for engaging with both."

British Journal for the History of Science

"Smith’s study encompasses the period from 1400 to 1800, when practitioners increasingly sought to put their trades in words, composing and publishing craft manuals, guides, treatises, recipe books, tip sheets and diagrams... These texts, she argues, enrich our understanding of the theoretical world of European makers, the development of technical writing and, by extension, the birth of modern science."

London Review of Books

This book is a cogently original account of skilled practice, its expression in writing, and its significance for the culture of knowledge as the new sciences developed in early modern Europe. With roots in the world—renowned Making and Knowing Project, it offers an important addition to the histories of skilled craft practice, of science and technology, and of the premodern and early modern periods.

Pamela O. Long

"Building from her research and years of hands—on experiences, science historian Pamela H. Smith’s latest title. . . confirms intersections between materials, craft, technique, and developing scientific expertise in early modern European workshops. . . So, if you ever soften some wax to create your special scented candles or take a shot at melting metals to make ornaments and vessels, consider recording the entire creation experience. Ways of making lead toward knowing and may end up serving intelligibly, for posterity."

Hyperallergic

This is a brilliant, groundbreaking, and timely book. Through a particularly novel and exciting approach, Smith offers the first book—length study on the way early modern practitioners wrote about their skills. It is a must read for the growing community of scholars interested in material culture and in the ways how bodies, minds, things, and materials interact with each other.

Christine Göttler

"Focused on ground zero of the scientific revolution—early modern Europe—Smith seeks to 'jolt' us into reassessing our basic categories of knowledge . . . In place of aristocratic gentlemen, Smith centers skilled craftspeople: carpenters, metalworkers, painters, masons, sailors, engineers, and painters. These people worked with their hands, but Smith argues that they did a lot more: they philosophized with their hands, and in doing so taught the world an 'artisanal epistemology' that valued experience, observation, experiment, and manipulation. Their distinctive form of knowing was taken up by natural philosophers at the end of the seventeenth century and turned into what we now call modern science, she argues, but its artisan lineage was also erased in the new narratives of scientific revolution. Smith seeks to recover the artisan worldview on its own terms."

Boston Review

"There are books which close the discussion by offering the final world, and others which open fields by drastically altering the terms of discussion. From Lived Experience to the Written Word Is a perfectly crafted book belonging to the latter category."

Ambix

"[The book] simultaneously narrates and performs a new epistemological approach and, at least implicitly, a new pedagogy that can more richly address nonverbal knowledge about nature and its materials, which play such a central role in Smith’s thinking. . . . From Lived Experience reproduces the caesuras seen between the remarkable crafts products and the equally remarkable texts by practitioner—authors that were at the center of the book’s first three sections. . . . The positive lesson, though, is that engaged and insightful scholarship can convey the richness and coherence of this knowledge and its significance for larger processes of cultural and epistemic change. To gain these lessons while being awed and amazed by the skill, the imagination, and the tenacity of [Smith's] subjects, who braved not only evil smoke but all the disruptions that tore apart early modern Europe while creating remarkable and beautiful things, is a gift."


 

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