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

352 Pages·2022·148.362 MB·English

by  Pamela H. Smith

FROM LIVED EXPERIENCE
TO THE WRITTEN WORD

PAMELA H. SMITH
From Lived
Experience to
the Written
W ord
RECONSTRUCTING PRACTICAL
KNOWLEDGE IN THE EARLY
MODERN WORLD
THE UNIVERSITY OF
CHICAGO PRESS
Chicago & London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2022 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced
in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in
the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more
information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St.,
Chicago, IL 60637.
Published 2022
Printed in China
31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN 13: 978 0 226 80027 1 (cloth)
ISBN 13: 978 0 226 818245 (paper)
ISBN 13: 978 0 226 818238 (e book)
DOI: https:// doi .org /10 .7208 /chicago /9780226818238 .0001
Published with the assistance of the Getty Grant Program
Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data
Names: Smith, Pamela H., 1957 author.
Title: From lived experience to the written word : reconstructing
practical knowledge in the early modern world / Pamela H. Smith.
Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021042946 | ISBN 9780226800271 (cloth) |
ISBN 9780226818245 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226818238 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Technical writing History. | Artisans History.
Classification: LCC T11.S575 2022 | DDC 808.06/66 dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021042946
∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48 1992
(Permanence of Paper).
Contents
Introduction: Lived Experience and
the Written Word 1
Part 1: Vernacular Theorizing in Craft
1. Is Handwork Knowledge? 21
2. The Metalworker’s Philosophy 43
3. Thinking with Lizards 65
Part 2: Writing Down Experience
4. Artisan Authors 91
5. Writing Kunst 117
6. Recipes for Kunst 139
Part 3: Reading and Collecting
7. Who Read and Used Little Books of Art? 151
8. Kunst as Power: Making and Collecting 177
Part 4: Making and Knowing
9. Reconstructing Practical Knowledge:
Hastening to Experience 203
10. A Lexicon for Mind- Body Knowing 231
Epilogue: Global Routes of Practical
Knowledge 251
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 263
NOTES 267
REFERENCES 293
INDEX 329

[ INTRODUCTION ]
Lived Experience and
the Written Word
How- To Manuals
When I sat down to write this book a little over a decade ago, I began with what seemed a
truism: we all take so- called how- to manuals for granted; they come with new appliances,
computers, and Ikea furniture. Today, this is no longer the case. Computers have built-i n
“Help” features, and online communities solve our problems and answer our questions;
we learn how to put together furniture and repair our appliances with YouTube videos. For
some years after they stopped being printed, I missed those thick, seemingly comprehen-
sive computer manuals, but now it seems remarkable to me that we once relied upon such
printed instructions. The nature of software development has made the definitive printed
manual a thing of the past, and YouTube has proven to many that it is easier to learn hand
knowledge and techniques by watching an experienced practitioner. The founding in 2006
of the online Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE, www .jove .com), in which highly
specialized laboratory and clinical procedures are narrated through video footage, indi-
cates that these changes are not confined to hobbies and do-i t- yourself (DIY) projects. In
the natural sciences, such problems of capturing how- to knowledge in writing can con-
tribute to the difficulties involved in the replication of experiments by other researchers.
At a moment when instructional how-t o writing appears to be becoming less ubiquitous,
From Lived Experience to the Written Word traces the early modern origins of such writ-
ing, locating the attempt to capture technique and skill in the transition from embodied
practice and lived experience to the written word and textual description. In about 1400,
European artists and craftspeople began writing down their techniques in texts often ti-
tled “books of art” or, in German, Kunstbücher or Kunstbüchlein (little books of art). Some
of these texts and the recipes and instructions they contained were published with the
advent of the printing press in Europe, while others remained in manuscript for centu-
ries. Despite the difficulty of writing down techniques, let alone using the written accounts
to learn a craft, many of these books became bestsellers for their printers. What was the
appeal of these texts, and who read them? This book provides one answer to that question.
It also considers technique and skill: why are they so hard to learn and teach? what kinds
of knowledge are they? And why try to translate what are essentially bodily gestures into
words in the first place?
INTRODUCTION
Lived Experience and Lived Experience and the Written Word
the Written Word
Writing things down seems second nature to a literate and text- centered society. Yet, the
2
debate over the merit of the written word is as old as writing itself. Despite its expression
almost thirteen hundred years ago, a sentiment such as that of the eighth- century Bed-
ouin poet Dhu’l Rumma (c. 696– c. 735) resonates for us: “Write down my poems, because
I favour the book over memory [ . . . ] the book does not forget and does not exchange any
word for another.”¹ Dhu’l Rumma’s view of the advantages of writing seems self- evident
to us, however, it was a position that had to be argued for. In a well- known passage from
Plato’s (427– 347 BCE) dialogue Phaedrus, Socrates condemned the discovery of writing by
the god Theuth:
If men learn [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise
memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer
from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe
not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but
only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make
them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not
with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom.²
Socrates sees painting and writing as similar because their products “stand before us as
though they were alive, but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence
[ . . . ] if you ask them anything [ . . . ] they go on telling you just the same thing forever.”
Moreover, “once a thing is put in writing, the composition, whatever it may be, drifts all
over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of
those who have no business with it.” In this remarkable passage, which seems so strange
to our text- centered culture, Socrates distinguishes between true embodied wisdom and a
feeble externalized collection of data, a listlike reminder.
Many of the artisan authors discussed in From Lived Experience to the Written Word
also expressed a distrust of writing. They declared— somewhat paradoxically, in writing—
that writing was inadequate to their task. The goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini
(1500– 1571) wrote in the 1550s: “How careful you have to be with this cannot be told in
words alone— you’ll have to learn that by experience.”³ More than a century after Cellini,
after decades of published technical treatises had established the genre, the printer and
mapmaker Joseph Moxon (1627– 91) wrote in his history of trades, Mechanick Exercises,
that “Craft of the Hand [ . . . ] cannot be taught by Words, but is only gained by Practise
and Exercise.”⁴
Moxon’s point was made over and over again by practitioners when they sat down to INTRODUCTION
write out their techniques, and YouTube and JoVE have made clear again for us that it is Lived Experience and
the Written Word
often far more time- consuming to attempt to describe handwork in words than simply to
demonstrate it. Most important, skilled and expert performance of techniques can never
3
be taught in writing; they take time and much practice, and they necessitate communities
of practitioners both to develop and define what constitutes skilled practice and to teach
and transmit it.
In short, the relationship between writing and experience was and is fraught, and state-
ments such as Moxon’s help us recognize the significance of the act among craftspeople
of putting pen to paper to record the experience of the workshop. Their texts proliferated
from about 1400, and the success and popularity of these texts both reflected and fostered
a new interest in practice that celebrated the potential and power of practical knowledge.
It also informed one of the most significant transformations in the engagement of human
beings with nature— the founding and growth of a “new philosophy” that proclaimed a
hands- on approach to the study of nature. What began in unceasing trials of the craft
workshop ended in the experimentation of the natural scientific laboratory.
Mind over Hand
This book traces a key development in the history of knowledge and epistemology, but the
story of practice gaining a voice, or at least a written form, has social dimensions as well.
Through their writing, skilled artisans gained intellectual and social authority. The peo-
ple who formed an audience for texts of practice sometimes even tried their own hands
at making things— turning on lathes or metal casting, among other types of handwork.
Although the period from 1400 is marked by this burgeoning interest in practical knowl-
edge, and by greater interaction among those individuals trained by texts in schools and
universities, and those trained by hands- on experience under a master within an orga-
nized community of artisans, an intellectual and social hierarchy continued to put theory
above practice, abstract thinking above bodily experience, and mind above hand. Denis
Diderot’s article “Art” in the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts
et des métiers (1751– 72) testifies to this ambivalent attitude to the arts and artisans by the
late eighteenth century on the part of learned writers: on the one hand, artisans are selfish
and ignorant, contributing only bodily labor; on the other, they hold valuable knowledge
for the kingdom:
we invite the artists to take counsel with learned men and not to allow their discoveries to
perish with them. The artists should know that to lock up a useful secret is to render oneself
guilty of theft from society. It is just as despicable to prefer the interest of one individual to
the common welfare in this case as in a hundred others where the artists themselves would
INTRODUCTION not hesitate to decide for the common good. If they communicate their discoveries they will
Lived Experience and be freed of several preconceptions and especially of the illusion, which almost all of them hold,
the Written Word
that their art has reached its ultimate perfection. Because they have so little learning they are
often inclined to blame the nature of things for a defect that exists only in themselves. Obsta
4
cles seem insuperable to them whenever they do not know the means of overcoming them. Let
them carry out experiments and let everyone make his contribution to these experiments: the
artist should contribute his work, the academician his knowledge and advice, the rich man the
cost of materials, labor, and time; soon our arts and our manufactures will be as superior as we
could wish to those of other countries.⁵
Although this passage emerges out of a particular economic moment in French history,
it expresses assumptions and prejudices about artisans that were common throughout
the early modern period, even as fascination with the products and potential of art and
handwork grew.
That these preconceptions are still alive can be seen in Walter J. Ong’s argument in
“Writing Is a Technology That Restructures Thought” that literacy increases objectivity,
makes it possible for an individual to transcend their own time-b ounded being, and pro-
vides an escape from the narrativity of oral cultures to attain the analytical thinking and
philosophy of literate cultures.⁶ In contrast to Plato in the Phaedrus, Ong does not think
philosophy is possible in the absence of writing. What is often forgotten in such text- and
writing- centered accounts is that practices do not need to be articulated verbally to be con-
ceptualized and controlled by the practitioner.⁷ Diverging from both these writers, I argue
in From Lived Experience to the Written Word that artists and artisans in early modern
Europe did not need writing to produce things and make knowledge, yet they nevertheless
turned increasingly to writing to argue for a new place in the hierarchy of knowledge, to
convey their “material imaginary,” their epistemology, and a theory of skill.
Histories of Science and Art
As the labor of making came into view for elites as a powerful component of material
production and natural knowledge, “new philosophers” proclaiming a new science in
early modern Europe recognized that bodily engagement with natural materials was an
essential part of gaining knowledge about nature. Many historians of science over the last
thirty years or so have recounted the intersection of vernacular and scholarly cultures
that resulted in a new union of hand and mind and over the following centuries built the