front cover of From Lived Experience to the Written Word
From Lived Experience to the Written Word
Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World
Pamela H. Smith
University of Chicago Press, 2022
How and why early modern European artisans began to record their knowledge.

In From Lived Experience to the Written Word, Pamela H. Smith considers how and why, beginning in 1400 CE, European craftspeople began to write down their making practices. Rather than simply passing along knowledge in the workshop, these literate artisans chose to publish handbooks, guides, treatises, tip sheets, graphs, and recipe books, sparking early technical writing and laying the groundwork for how we think about scientific knowledge today.
 
Focusing on metalworking from 1400–1800 CE, Smith looks at the nature of craft knowledge and skill, studying present-day and historical practices, objects, recipes, and artisanal manuals. From these sources, she considers how we can reconstruct centuries of largely lost knowledge. In doing so, she aims not only to unearth the techniques, material processes, and embodied experience of the past but also to gain insight into the lifeworld of artisans and their understandings of matter.
 
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The Work in the World
Geographical Practice and the Written Word
Michael R. Curry
University of Minnesota Press, 1996

The Work in the World was first published in 1996. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

The writing or reading or buying or selling or judging of a written work is always at the same time the act of making a place-or making places. The author creates a special sort of place for his ideas; the reader, for her engagement with the author; the bookseller, for the notion of books as property to be categorized and sold; and so on. In this book, Michael R. Curry develops a geography of this process, a theory of the nature of space and places in written work.

The Work in the World focuses on a paradox at the heart of this project: Although the written work is inextricably bound up in the construction of the places in which it is written, read, published, circulated, and cited, it nonetheless denies the importance of places. As the product of modern modes of knowledge, technology, and intellectual property, written work seems to say instead that only the encompassing universal space of ideas, objects, and commodities matters.

Distinctive for the way it views theories in geography and science as fundamentally embedded in written works, The Work in the World argues eloquently that the philosophical questions raised by theories can only be addressed within the broader context of the work.

Michael R. Curry is associate professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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