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Category: Artisanal Knowledge

How Ignorance Made Modern Science

Montaigne’s celebration of ignorance and simplicity in his erudite Essays (1580) may seem paradoxical at first, but such praises were not uncommon in the early modern period. Montaigne’s friend, Pierre Charron, made similar claims two decades later in his widely read treatise Of Wisdome.

African American Lucumí Devotees’ Adoption and Adaptation of African Diasporic Religious Knowledge in the U.S.

This short piece traces how the Black Power era affected the unfolding of the transmission of African diasporic religious knowledge and how it contributed to the evolution of specifically African American variations of Lucumí...

Practical Kabbalah and Practical Knowledge: Kabbalistic Manuals and Natural Knowledge in Early Modern East-Central Europe

An impressive handwritten codex at the National Library of Israel embodies the intricacies and peculiarities of crafting, reading, and transmitting practical knowledge in early modern Jewish contexts. The volume, known today as manuscript NLI...

‘Why Write a Book? From Lived Experience to the Written Word…’

Pamela H. Smith, “Why Write a Book? From Lived Experience to the Written Word in Early Modern Europe,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute [Washington, DC] 47 (Fall 2010): 25–50.

In this article, Pamela Smith links the tacit and explicit knowledge of artisans in an innovative way. See also Jonathan Sheehan’s interesting review of Smith’s related book, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004).