Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe
Practices, Objects, and Texts, 1400 - 1800
336 pages
|
4 color plates, 51 halftones
|
6 x 9
|
© 2008
The fruits of knowledge—such as books, data, and ideas—tend to generate far more attention than the ways in which knowledge is produced and acquired. Correcting this imbalance, Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe brings together a wide-ranging yet tightly integrated series of 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.
Composed by scholars in disciplines ranging from the history of science to art history to religious studies, the pieces collected here look at the production and consumption of knowledge as a social process within many different communities. They focus, in particular, on how the methods employed by scientists and intellectuals came to interact with the practices of craftspeople and practitioners to create new ways of knowing. Examining the role of texts, reading habits, painting methods, and countless other forms of knowledge making, this volume brilliantly illuminates the myriad ways these processes affected and were affected by the period’s monumental shifts in culture and learning.
Composed by scholars in disciplines ranging from the history of science to art history to religious studies, the pieces collected here look at the production and consumption of knowledge as a social process within many different communities. They focus, in particular, on how the methods employed by scientists and intellectuals came to interact with the practices of craftspeople and practitioners to create new ways of knowing. Examining the role of texts, reading habits, painting methods, and countless other forms of knowledge making, this volume brilliantly illuminates the myriad ways these processes affected and were affected by the period’s monumental shifts in culture and learning.
Deborah Harkness, University of Southern California
“Pamela Smith and Benjamin Schmidt have gathered together a wide-ranging and provocative set of original essays that successfully demonstrate how contingent the process of making knowledge was during a period of fundamental epistemological change. This is a finely crafted and conceptualized collection.”
Simon Schaffer, University of Cambridge
“The major transformations of knowledge and social order in early modern Europe have long posed exciting and challenging problems for historians. This carefully organized new collection addresses these problems by focusing on the ways in which knowledge was then produced and how the status of knowledge was thus changed. Contributors show impressively how a much broader range of kinds of knowledge must be studied, juxtaposing the ways of knowing of painters and travelers, of chemists and midwives. They also show how a decisive aspect of knowledge making depended on innovativeand intense relations between scholars and artisans: traditions of recipe-making and of artful design were essential to the most important developments in ways of knowing.”
Michael J. Sauter | H-Net Review
"This text is recommended for both specialists and non-specialists alike because of both the breadth of the contributions and the key lesson that it teaches: namely, that knowledge can be the result of a bewildering and surprising variety of processes. . . . In general, all the contributions make for stimulating reading and serve as useful introductions to current debates and problems."
For more information, or to order this book, please visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu
Google preview here
History: European History
Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory
You may purchase this title at these fine bookstores. Outside the USA, see our international sales information.
