Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe
Author: Pamela H. Smith
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226763293

Aims to bring together essays that explore how knowledge was obtained and demonstrated in Europe during an intellectually explosive four centuries, when standard methods of inquiry took shape across several fields of intellectual pursuit. This book looks at production and consumption of knowledge as a social process within different communities.

Making Publics in Early Modern Europe

Making Publics in Early Modern Europe
Author: Bronwen Wilson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 415
Release: 2011-07-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 113516892X

The book looks at how people, things, and new forms of knowledge created "publics" in early modern Europe, and how publics changed the shape of early modern society. The focus is on what the authors call "making publics" — the active creation of new forms of association that allowed people to connect with others in ways not rooted in family, rank or vocation, but rather founded in voluntary groupings built on the shared interests, tastes, commitments, and desires of individuals. By creating new forms of association, cultural producers and consumers challenged dominant ideas about just who could be a public person, greatly expanded the resources of public life for ordinary people in their own time, and developed ideas and practices that have helped create the political culture of modernity. Coming from a number of disciplines including literary and cultural studies, art history, history of religion, history of science, and musicology, the contributors develop analyses of a range of cases of early modern public-making that together demonstrate the rich inventiveness and formative social power of artistic and intellectual publication in this period.

From Lived Experience to the Written Word

From Lived Experience to the Written Word
Author: Pamela H. Smith
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2022-09-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226818241

"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. Smith 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 continued to the present day and still inform how we think about scientific knowledge"--

Inky Fingers

Inky Fingers
Author: Anthony Grafton
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2020-06-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 067423717X

The author of The Footnote reflects on scribes, scholars, and the work of publishing during the golden age of the book. From Francis Bacon to Barack Obama, thinkers and political leaders have denounced humanists as obsessively bookish and allergic to labor. In this celebration of bookmaking in all its messy and intricate detail, renowned historian Anthony Grafton invites us to see the scholars of early modern Europe as diligent workers. Meticulously illuminating the physical and mental labors that fostered the golden age of the book—the compiling of notebooks, copying and correction of texts and proofs, preparation of copy—he shows us how the exertions of scholars shaped influential books, treatises, and forgeries. Inky Fingers ranges widely, tracing the transformation of humanistic approaches to texts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and examining the simultaneously sustaining and constraining effects of theological polemics on sixteenth-century scholars. Grafton draws new connections between humanistic traditions and intellectual innovations, textual learning and craft knowledge, manuscript and print. Above all, Grafton makes clear that the nitty-gritty of bookmaking has had a profound impact on the history of ideas—that the life of the mind depends on the work of the hands.

Contextualizing Practical Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

Contextualizing Practical Knowledge in Early Modern Europe
Author: Annemie Leemans
Publisher: CITCEM
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre: Europe
ISBN: 9783631780442

The topic of this book is practical knowledge in early modern Europe, interpreted widely as recipes containing art procedures or medical panaceas. In this book the 1) origin or creation, 2) transmission or dissemination, and 3) use or consumption are key subjects. It includes a microhistory approach to the book A Very Proper Treatise (1573).

Ingenuity in the Making

Ingenuity in the Making
Author: Richard J. Oosterhoff
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2021-11-09
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0822988461

Ingenuity in the Making explores the myriad ways in which ingenuity shaped the experience and conceptualization of materials and their manipulation in early modern Europe. Contributions range widely across the arts and sciences, examining objects and texts, professions and performances, concepts and practices. The book considers subjects such as spirited matter, the conceits of nature, and crafty devices, investigating the ways in which ingenuity acted in and upon the material world through skill and technique. Contributors ask how ingenuity informed the “maker’s knowledge” tradition, where the perilous borderline between the genius of invention and disingenuous fraud was drawn, charting the ambitions of material ingenuity in a rapidly globalizing world.

The Visualization of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

The Visualization of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Author: J. H. Chajes
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
Total Pages: 475
Release: 2020
Genre:
ISBN: 9782503583037

All of us are exposed to graphic means of communication on a daily basis. Our life seems flooded with lists, tables, charts, diagrams, models, maps, and forms of notation. Although we now take such devices for granted, their role in the codification and transmission of knowledge evolved within historical contexts where they performed particular tasks. The medieval and early modern periods stand as a formative era during which visual structures, both mental and material, increasingly shaped and systematized knowledge. Yet these periods have been sidelined as theorists interested in the epistemic potential of visual strategies have privileged the modern natural sciences. This volume expands the field of research by focusing on the relationship between the arts of memory and modes of graphic mediation through the sixteenth century. Chapters encompass Christian (Greek as well as Latin) production, Jewish (Hebrew) traditions, and the transfer of Arabic learning. The linked essays anthologized here consider the generative power of schemata, cartographic representation, and even the layout of text: more than merely compiling information, visual arrangements formalize abstract concepts, provide grids through which to process data, set in motion analytic operations that give rise to new ideas, and create interpretive frameworks for understanding the world.

Scholarly Knowledge

Scholarly Knowledge
Author: Emidio Campi
Publisher: Librairie Droz
Total Pages: 454
Release: 2008
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9782600011860

Any attempt to understand the roles that textbooks played for early modern teachers and pupils must begin with the sobering realization that the field includes many books that the German word Lehrbuch and its English counterpart do not call to mind. The early modern classroom was shaken by the same knowledge explosion that took place in individual scholars' libraries and museums, and transformed by the same printers, patrons and vast cultural movements that altered the larger world it served. In the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, the urban grammar school, the German Protestant Gymnasium and the Jesuit College, all of which did so much to form the elites of early modern Europe, took shape; the curricula of old and new universities fused humanistic with scholastic methods in radically novel ways. By doing so, they claimed a new status for both the overt and the tacit knowledge that made their work possible. This collected volume presents case studies by renowned experts, among them Ann Blair, Jill Kraye, Juergen Leonhardt, Barbara Mahlmann-Bauer and Nancy Siraisi.

Making Archives in Early Modern Europe

Making Archives in Early Modern Europe
Author: Randolph C. Head
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2019-06-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108473784

Compares the archives of European states after 1500 to reveal changes in how records supported memory, authority and power.

Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe

Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe
Author: Ursula Klein
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2010-04-15
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0226439704

It is often assumed that natural philosophy was the forerunner of early modern natural sciences. But where did these sciences’ systematic observation and experimentation get their starts? In Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe, the laboratories, workshops, and marketplaces emerge as arenas where hands-on experience united with higher learning. In an age when chemistry, mineralogy, geology, and botany intersected with mining, metallurgy, pharmacy, and gardening, materials were objects that crossed disciplines. Here, the contributors tell the stories of metals, clay, gunpowder, pigments, and foods, and thereby demonstrate the innovative practices of technical experts, the development of the consumer market, and the formation of the observational and experimental sciences in the early modern period. Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe showcases a broad variety of forms of knowledge, from ineffable bodily skills and technical competence to articulated know-how and connoisseurship, from methods of measuring, data gathering, and classification to analytical and theoretical knowledge. By exploring the hybrid expertise involved in the making, consumption, and promotion of various materials, and the fluid boundaries they traversed, the book offers an original perspective on important issues in the history of science, medicine, and technology.