Excerpts from Anthony Grafton’s review From Lived Experiences to the Written Word"

[Excerpts from Anthony Grafton’s review in The New York Review of Books]

From Lived Experiences to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World, by Pamela H. Smith (University of Chicago Press, 2022)

“The knowledge that underpins our world of things…has been discovered over centuries, through trial and error, two steps forward and one step back. It has been produced and improved by collaboration: the work of talented, largely anonymous groups, generation after generation, rather than identifiable individuals. And it is less verbal than embodied.”

…

EMBODIED KNOWLEDGE: “Each task required a command of materials and textures, tools and their uses—expertise that had to be acquired by touch and hearing, smell and sight. This sort of learning is gained by handling objects. It means training one’s hands to do many basic things precisely, quickly, and automatically—leaving the mind free to concentrate on the most complex parts of the task.”

…

“Albrecht Dürer wrote of his docta manus—his learned hand. Every real craftsman has learned hands. But artisans and artists must also master materials—the complex and sometimes confounding works of nature, never exactly the same from one copse or quarry to another, or from one time of year to the next.”

…

François Rabelais and Juan Luis Vives

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“To what extent did artists—especially the most prestigious ones—belong to the same world as her makers? Smith’s book is a tribute to the democratic intellect, in a form with which most moderns have become unfamiliar. Some of the star artists and architects of her period shared her deep respect for the anonymous work of craft. Albrecht Dürer, for example, wrote eloquently of his admiration for the Aztec craftspeople, otherwise unknown to him, whose work in gold and silver and “wonderful objects of human use” he saw in Brussels in 1520.”