From lived experience to the written word Reconstructing practical knowledge in the early modern world

Pamela H. Smith, 1957-

Book - 2022

"This book focuses on how literate artisans began to write about their discoveries starting around 1400: in other words, it explores the origins of technical writing. Artisans and artists began to publish handbooks, guides, treatises, tip sheets, graphs, and recipe books rather than simply pass along their knowledge in the workshop. And they tried to articulate what the new knowledge meant. The popularity of these texts coincided with the founding of a "new philosophy" that sought to investigate nature in a new way. In this book, the author shows how this moment began in the unceasing trials of the craft workshop, and ended in the experimentation of the natural scientific laboratory. These epistemological developments have co...ntinued into the twenty-first century and still inform how we think about scientific knowledge."-- more