Artisans Products and Gifts Rethinking T

ARTISANS, PRODUCTS AND GIFTS:
RETHINKING THE HISTORY OF

MATERIAL CULTURE IN EARLY
MODERN EUROPE*
I
INTRODUCTION
Following the material turn in the social sciences, historical
Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on July 25, 2014

research has sought to assign a place to materiality and to the
agency of objects in early modern societies, although this has
proved a difficult task.1 While agency is hard to pinpoint, narra-
tives of modernity have loomed large, and they still do. Urban
sociologists and geographers have argued, for example, that the
materiality of cities shaped human behaviour and thought, but,
if we look closer, questions remain as to whether agency is
ultimately connected to capital (an immaterial category) or to
powerful elites (such as policymakers and urban planners, who
literally shape the city).2
In the realm of consumption, there has been a tendency to
identify a ‘modern’ consumer, the origins of whom, according
to current research, are locatable in the Renaissance.3 Here, the
ideas of the anthropologist Daniel Miller have been important.
According to Miller, cultural objects produce values and mean-
ings that help to form contemporary subjectivities through a pro-
cess of both production (externalization) and consumption
* This article was written in the context of the IAP network ‘City and Society in the
Low Countries, ca. 1200–ca. 1850: The ‘‘Condition Urbaine’’. Between Resilience
and Vulnerability’. It has profited greatly from discussions with my colleagues at the
Centre of Urban History at the University of Antwerp, in particular with those spe-
cializing in the history of material culture.
1
For a status quaestionis with extensive references, see Frank Trentmann,
‘Materiality in the Future of History: Things, Practices, and Politics’, Journal of
British Studies, xlviii (2009).
2
See, among others, Henri Lefebvre, La Production de l’espace (Paris, 1974); David
Harvey, The Urbanization of Capital (Baltimore, 1985).
3
See, in particular, Richard A. Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy,
1300–1600 (Baltimore, 1993).
Past and Present, no. 224 (August 2014) ß The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2014
doi:10.1093/pastj/gtu012
40 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 224
(internalization).4 In this vein, historians of material culture have

assumed that consumer durables started to serve as an ‘objectifi-
cation of the self’ during the Renaissance.5 In principle, a type of
agency is again assigned to objects, though without precluding the
persistently central position of a modern sort of individual.6
Either from a Marxist perspective or from the perspective of
Miller’s more optimistic alternative approach, objects and
materiality are in the end subject to the agency of such modern
abstractions as capital or the modern consumer. On a more direct
level, the importance of materiality is of course evident in research
on luxury, pleasure and comfort, underscoring the importance of
raw material qualities in both the design and moral quality of

products.7 But here again, questions remain as to whether
agency does not ultimately result from a modern type of individ-
ual, who is considered to assess materiality and artefacts in an
instrumental or utilitarian way.
To be sure, ever since the so-called ‘cultural turn’, the modern
individual has been largely demystified, that is, debunked as a
cultural and historical construct. Yet this has not prevented ob-
jects from being instrumentalized. Following the influence of
post-structuralism and the semiology of Ferdinand de Saussure,
objects are often reduced to a type of ‘sign’.8 Implicitly, they are
seen as signifiers, whose respective meanings (and thus values)
depend upon the particular signifier’s place within a broader field
of signifiers, as well as on the ‘reading’ gaze of individuals and
4
Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Oxford, 1987), pt I. See
also Fred R. Myers, ‘Introduction: The Empire of Things’, in Fred R. Myers (ed.),
The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture (Santa Fe, 2001), 20–7;
Christopher Tilley, ‘Objectification’, in Christopher Tilley et al. (eds.), Handbook of
Material Culture (London, 2006).
5
‘People entered a realm where possessions become an objectification of self for the
first time . . . man attached himself in a dynamic and creative way to things . . . and with
the discovery of things modern civilization was born’: Goldthwaite, Wealth and the
Demand for Art in Italy, 255.
6
See Lauro Martines, ‘The Renaissance and the Birth of Consumer Society’,
Renaissance Quarterly, li (1998).
7
For example, Luke Syson and Dora Thornton, Objects of Virtue: Art in Renaissance
Italy (Los Angeles, 2001), ch. 5; Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger (eds.), Luxury in the
Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods (New York, 2003), pt III;
Maxine Berg, ‘In Pursuit of Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods
in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, no. 182 (Feb. 2004); Maxine Berg,
Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2005).
8
Trentmann, ‘Materiality in the Future of History’, 288. For an introduction to the
anthropological literature, see David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of
Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (Basingstoke, 2001), ch. 1.
ARTISANS, PRODUCTS AND GIFTS 41
groups. In a somewhat paradoxical way, then, this corresponds to
objects being regarded as instruments in the hands of Cartesian
subjects who communicate with and assign value to such objects
more or less autonomously.
In my view, recent research has therefore yielded teleological
views, in which modern consumers and systems of meaning serve
as the lens through which objects and materiality are observed.
This is exemplified by the fact that the ideas and practices of those
actors closest to the object — artisans — are mostly not taken into
account. While debates about the moral and economic rationale of
consuming new luxuries are presented as discussions among
intellectuals,9 consumption-centred capitalism is linked to emer-

gent cultural channels and frameworks of public life such as cafés,
newspapers and bookshops.10 In this context, the attitudes of
artisans (the manufacturers themselves), which were of course
recorded far less frequently, continue to be eclipsed. Even
though their guilds are in the process of being rehabilitated his-
toriographically, this is carried out from a ‘modern’ economic
perspective in which their moral and cultural ideas and social
practices are either considered obsolete or reduced to instru-
ments for solving modern economic problems, answering, for
instance, the need for mutual trust.11
In order to assess truly the validity of the historical approach, it
is essential to analyse how a cultural system of meaning emerged
in which objects and materiality became subject to a ‘symbolical
order’ and to a Cartesian subject who assigned value more or less
autonomously. To that end, I shall focus upon attitudes towards
material culture that have been discredited or neglected by
Enlightenment thinkers and historians of material culture alike.
According to Bruno Latour, the well-known sociologist of science
and founder of actor–network theory, the agency of objects de-
pends both on their materiality and on their place within the
9
For example, Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford, ‘Introduction’, in Maxine Berg
and Helen Clifford (eds.), Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe, 1650–
1850 (Manchester, 1999).
10
William H. Sewell Jr, ‘The Empire of Fashion and the Rise of Capitalism in
Eighteenth-Century France’, Past and Present, no. 206 (Feb. 2010). See also Colin
Jones, ‘The Great Chain of Buying: Medical Advertisement, the Bourgeois Public
Sphere, and the Origins of the French Revolution’, American Historical Review, ci, 1
(Feb. 1996).
11
A status quaestionis in Stephan R. Epstein and Maarten Prak (eds.), Guilds,
Innovation, and the European Economy, 1400–1800 (Cambridge, 2008).
broader network of people and objects. A network not only as-

signs meaning and value to objects but also defines their relation-
ship to subjects.12 Moreover, every network naturalizes a certain
approach and understanding by concealing previous views, con-
flicts and uncertainties (‘blackboxing’, as Latour puts it).
Research should therefore include a focus on the silent and
silenced discursive practices of guild-based artisans, even if
these were not written down and can therefore be ascertained
only from their rituals, visual culture and regulations.13
The failure so far to link these issues to research on material
culture may be due at least in part to a certain over-specialization
in current historical research. While artisans have been examined

primarily by labour and economic historians, in studies that focus
on proletarianization processes and technological transform-
ations, historians of material culture have largely overlooked the
attitudes and sensitivities of producers and manufacturers. Given
the need to moderate teleological approaches to the emergence of
a modern consumer society, this may be an important missed
opportunity. Indeed, whereas Marxist approaches have assumed
a shift from a genuine to an artificial connection between subject
and object at the end of the ancien régime, it has recently been
argued by Pamela Smith and others that early modern artisans
and artists (not least of whom were the artisans of the Low
Countries) had a specific relationship with materiality before
the eighteenth century. While the realism presented by artists,
and the physical treatment applied by artisans to their materials,
were elements of great importance in the development of the
Scientific Revolution, matter would have been seen as ‘active’
among these groups. Artefacts and raw materials provided
access to the secrets of divine creation and, as such, had a kind
of creative potential as well.14
12
For an introduction, see Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to
Actor–Network–Theory (Oxford, 2005). A brilliant critical assessment is Graham
Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (Melbourne, 2009).
13
According to Roy Dilley, ‘the potential to create a hyper-real world of consump-
tion’ was ‘predicated upon making production invisible’: Roy Dilley, ‘The Visibility
and Invisibility of Production: In Different Social Contexts among Senegalese
Craftsmen’, in Wim M. J. van Binsbergen and Peter L. Geschiere (eds.),
Commodification: Things, Agency, and Identities. The Social Life of Things Revisited
(Münster, 2005), 40.
14
Pamela H. Smith, ‘Artists as Scientists: Nature and Realism in Early Modern
Europe’, Endeavour, xxiv, 1 (2000), esp. 17–18; Pamela H. Smith, ‘Vital Spirits:
Redemption, Artisanship, and the New Philosophy in Early Modern Europe’, in
(cont. on p. 43)
In line with these ideas, this article will develop the argument
that historians have overlooked a crucial point, namely, that chan-
ging consumer preferences and changing attitudes to matter were
related to a process in which manufacturing producers’ attitudes
towards objects and materiality became discredited. In the first
sections of this article I shall show that guild-based masters, at
least in strong guilds (that is, where guilds were to a large extent
instruments in the hands of manufacturing masters), cultivated
a particular connection between their own (collective) person-
hood and the quality of their products.15 This connection was
firmly embedded in the political (urban), ideological (corpora-

tive) and religious climate of the period through a focus on a kind
of ‘intrinsic value’ (the value of the raw materials used), which was
purposefully linked to the guild-based masters’ skills and morals.
Subsequently, it will be suggested that traditional approaches
have therefore failed to distinguish what was at stake for these
early modern artisans. While Marxist views on alienation and
estrangement (Entfremdung) go a long way towards explaining
the vicissitudes of manufacturing artisans during the transition
to industrial capitalism and the nineteenth-century consumer so-
ciety, it is difficult to connect Marxist concepts of use value and
concrete labour to the notion of intrinsic value and related early
modern views on guild-based skills. Cultural (post-structuralist)
approaches, in turn, are themselves indebted to an intellectual
tradition that has discredited and suppressed the guild-based
masters’ ideology and claims, and so they should likewise
be qualified.
(n. 14 cont.)
Margaret J. Osler (ed.), Rethinking the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, 2000), esp.
127–30; Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific
Revolution (Chicago, 2004).
15
For the distinction between strong guilds (for example, in the Southern
Netherlands and several German cities), in which manufacturing masters had a
great deal of political clout, and weak guilds (for example, in the Northern
Netherlands and England), in which merchants held the reins, see Catharina Lis
and Hugo Soly, ‘Different Paths of Development: Capitalism in the Northern and
Southern Netherlands during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period’, Review,
xx (1997); Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, ‘Subcontracting in Guild-Based Export
Trades, Thirteenth–Eighteenth Centuries’, and Ulrich Pfister, ‘Craft Guilds and
Technological Change: The Engine Loom in the European Silk Ribbon Industry in
the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, 178–9, both in Epstein and Prak (eds.),
Guilds, Innovation, and the European Economy.
In the final two sections of this article, I shall therefore tenta-

tively present two possible new approaches. First, it will be sug-
gested that products manufactured in a guild context (and
bearing a collective hallmark) could be examined from a gift per-
spective. In current research, anthropologists who are interested
in material culture are less likely to proceed from Marx than they
are to draw upon the gift theory of Marcel Mauss, which has
significant value for better understanding the complex relation-
ship between objects and subjects. The final section advances the
hypothesis that the fall of the craft guilds may have been part of an
epistemological shift in which both intrinsic value and the bodily

presence of guild-based masters in the public space became
obsolete. The final proposition of this article is that historians
of material culture have tended to work in the intellectual trad-
ition most responsible for the neglect and suppression of the
artisans’ perspective. Both the consumer revolution and post-
structuralist thinking may be part of what Latour has called a
‘purification process’, in which, owing to a strong impulse from
intellectuals and scientists, nature and culture became strictly
separated from each other while subjects constructed the myth
of being detached from objects.16
Admittedly, from this perspective it will still be hard to avoid
narratives of modernity. In my narrative, it will be difficult to
distinguish the ‘agency of objects’ from ‘discursive strategies of
artisans’, in part because the crucial point is precisely that the
masters themselves did not separate the two. Moreover, the ‘puri-
fication process’ that I shall identify partially resembles the ‘dis-
enchantment of the world’ as described (and partly rejected) by
religious and cultural historians.17 Historians of science hold
their own view of this process, which they situate in the period
of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment.18 Their
views in particular urged me to confront the history of material
culture with the rituals, practices and discourses of early modern
16
See esp. Bruno Latour, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes: essai d’anthropologie
symétrique (Paris, 1991); Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge,
MA, 1993).
17
For recent perspectives and extensive references, see Alexandra Walsham, ‘The
Reformation and the Disenchantment of the World Reassessed’, Historical Journal,
li, 2 (2008).
18
See, in particular, Lorraine Daston, ‘Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence
in Early Modern Europe’, Critical Inquiry, xviii (1991); Lorraine Daston and
Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York, 1998).
manufacturing artisans. Significantly, the Low Countries have
figured prominently in their research. Historians of science
have often investigated the interwoven nature of developments
in the visual arts and natural philosophy, notably in the Northern
Netherlands.19 These scholars have also addressed the active role
of merchants, particularly those who helped to reveal and to chart
the world by collecting curiosities and artefacts.20 Here as well,
the Northern Netherlands again figured prominently, as the mer-
chants from this area were relatively powerful and important.
My own research into the guild-based masters of the Southern
Netherlands is quite complementary in this respect. The rela-
tively significant economic power and the important political in-

fluence of those masters in Flanders and Brabant, as expressed in
concrete resistance to merchant entrepreneurs and enlightened
political elites, allow us to shed light on the preoccupations of
early modern artisans (rather than merchants). One empirical
consequence of this approach is that I shall often refer (in addition
to other secondary sources) to previously published works of my
own, the ideas of which I intend to develop further in this article.
In general, these works concern the Southern Netherlands, al-
though a comparative European perspective has already been
applied to one particular sector, that of tableware, owing to the
various types of raw material involved in this sector.21
II
ALIENATION AND THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PRODUCERS
AND THEIR PRODUCTS
Socio-economic historians investigating the early modern period
have tended to assume that products were already fully commo-
dified, that is, detached from both their producers and the social
context in which they circulated. The situation for labour was
different. Both the Brenner debate and the debate concerning
proto-industrialization focused on the process through which
19
See, for example, Smith, Body of the Artisan.
20
Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen (eds.), Merchants and Marvels: Commerce,
Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe (London, 2002); Harold J. Cook, Matters of
Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven,
2007).
21
Bert De Munck, ‘The Agency of Branding and the Location of Value: Trade
Marks and Monograms in Early Modern Tableware Industries’, Business History,
liv, 7 (2012).
labour is transformed into a type of commodity. However, both

debates tend towards a one-dimensional interpretation based on
the loss of control over the means of production rather than over
products and their value. While farmers lost control over the land
that they cultivated, urban and rural industries were experiencing
a transition from a purchasing system (in which merchants pro-
cured finished products from small producers) to a putting-out
system (in which merchants also supplied the raw materials and
instruments).22
Research and debate on workers’ alienation and estrangement
before and during the industrial revolutions had, in their heyday

of the 1970s and 1980s, predominantly focused on technological,
organizational and managerial transformations. While Marxism
often featured in vulgar views on the loss of control over the
means of production and the division of labour, alienation was
reduced to deskilling and factory discipline.23 Discussions during
the subsequent cultural turn have helped us to appreciate the
importance and relative autonomy of perceptions of and dis-
courses on labour — whether from outside or from the workers
themselves — but, not unlike the cultural (post-structuralist)
approach to objects, skills were here stripped of their materiality
and detached from their material products.24 What has remained
underexplored, therefore, is the changing relationship of workers
to their products. Although Marxism, in theory, makes it possible
to chart processes of alienation and commodity fetishism, anthro-
pologists and other social scientists have tended to agree that
these Marxist concepts serve primarily to explain capitalism
itself.25 Marxists are familiar with the concept of abstract
22
See T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin (eds.), The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class
Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe (Cambridge, 1987);
Sheilagh C. Ogilvie and Markus Cerman, European Proto-industrialization
(Cambridge, 1996).
23
For example, K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and
Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1985), ch. 5; Harry Braverman, Labor and
Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York,
1974); S. A. Marglin, ‘What Do Bosses Do? The Origins and Functions of
Hierarchy in Capitalist Production’, Review of Radical Political Economics, vi, 2
(1974), vii, 1 (1975).
24
See, in particular, William H. Sewell Jr, Work and Revolution in France:
The Language of Labour from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge, 1980).
25
Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, ch. 2, esp. p. 25. Marx him-
self, of course, speaks of ‘the twofold nature of the labour embodied in commodities’,
rather than of a shift from one type of labour to another: Karl Marx, Das Kapital: Kritik
(cont. on p. 47)
labour, that is, labour in its quantifiable and measurable guise as
materialized in a commodity and (through exchange) valued in a
market context. Its counterpart is concrete labour, which in
theory is specific or immediate labour, by which useful things
are produced in a concrete social context and the value of
which remains unmediated by the market. But what exactly is
concrete labour in a premodern and guild context? 26 And how
did early modern artisans approach the value of their own labour?
It is fairly easy to understand labour in its specific concrete or
immediate form in an autarky, or even in a feudal dominion econ-
omy, where it can be equated with making useful things, whether

relatively independently or in the context of unpaid labour due to
the seigneur. On the face of it, guild-based artisans’ products were
different in that they were sold on a market and thus acquired
exchange value. From a Marxist perspective, guild-based masters
were the owners of the means of production, while their journey-
men were proletarianized workers. Yet guild-based masters often
worked either in networks of merchant capitalists who conveyed
their products to export markets, or as subcontractors to other,
larger master entrepreneurs. From this perspective, a large
number of the masters can themselves be seen as proletarianized
workers. From the classical perspective of labour relations and
surplus extraction, there is hardly any difference between a
master who was paid per piece by a merchant or entrepreneur,
and a journeyman working on piece-rates, particularly if the
master was paid (partly) in raw materials.
How should we understand alienation and the role of guilds in
this context? Close reading of several legal files in early modern
Antwerp shows that the producers who were organized within
guilds were not especially concerned that they worked on piece-
rates, or that they were paid in raw materials.27 Instead, mas-
ters typically resisted situations in which ‘unfree’ or ‘false’ masters
(n. 25 cont.)
der politischen Ökonomie (Hamburg, 1867), vol. i, pt 1, ch. 1, sect. 2, trans. in5https://
www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm4(accessed 15 Apr. 2014).
26
For a thorough attempt to link Marxism to materialism, see Bill Maurer, ‘In the
Matter of Marxism’, in Tilley et al. (eds.), Handbook of Material Culture.
27
It has also been observed that farmers sometimes chose to be paid in kind (a
portion of the yield), even though this cannot be explained by the monetary value of
the products in question: Benjamin S. Orlove and Henry J. Rutz, ‘Thinking about
Consumption: A Social Economy Approach’, in Henry J. Rutz and Benjamin S.
Orlove (eds.), The Social Economy of Consumption (Lanham, 1989), 8.
trespassed upon the guilds’ terrain by developing production

activities (and, therefore, employing apprentices, journeymen
or masters themselves) without being a member of the appropri-
ate guild. In an important legal process against leading merchants
who produced and sold earthenware pots with tin lids (in the
second half of the sixteenth century), the guild-based master-
pewterers protested that these merchants had begun to act as
producers themselves. They bought earthenware pots and tin
lids separately, which they then had assembled by a pewterer
(who disregarded the guilds’ rules, and who was consequently
reduced to a proletarianized labourer).28 Yet the difference

between a master and a labourer did not depend on the ownership
of the means of production, but on the existence (or not) of a clear
link between the manufacturer (as a guild-based master) and the
product’s value.
Essentially, these masters were defending the link between their
status as masters (and thus the privilege of manufacturing par-
ticular products) and their products’ value. The difference be-
tween a ‘free’ and an ‘unfree’ master was marked by the former
having completed an official apprenticeship, presented a master
piece and paid entrance fees: this entitled him to produce a spe-
cific range of products and to use a collective trademark or hall-
mark. As such, their status and privileges were closely associated
with their attitude towards product quality. In addition to com-
pleting a period of apprenticeship and a master test, those enter-
ing a trade were expected to commit themselves to working
according to certain collective norms and standards. The ultim-
ate argument in defence of their privileges was always that only
recognized masters could guarantee product quality. This was the
reason cited for why only those who had become masters in the
customary way held the exclusive right to use a collective hallmark
(or at least one that had been validated by the trade) and for why
these artisans continued to assign precedence to collective hall-
marks over individual marks, the latter being intended only to
identify a particular master in cases of fraud. The collective
mark referred to standards explicitly defined in the guild’s
28
For references, see Bert De Munck, ‘Skills, Trust and Changing Consumer
Preferences: The Decline of Antwerp’s Craft Guilds from the Perspective of the
Product Market, ca. 1500–ca. 1800’, International Review of Social History, liii, 2
(2008); Bert De Munck, ‘One Counter and Your Own Account: Redefining Illicit
Labour in Early Modern Antwerp’, Urban History, xxxvii, 1 (2010).
statutes, whereas a master’s individual mark was to be stamped on
a touch-plate kept by his guild’s officials.29 And while collective
hallmarks were always visible to customers, individual marks and
the marks applied by the officials who had inspected an item could
be placed inconspicuously — for instance, on the bottom of a
plate (such marks included letters or figures referring to a year
and, hence, to the dean or official then in charge) — whereas
hallmarks were placed on the rim.30
In this vein, the most important problem free masters faced was
that entrepreneurs brought products to the market without going
through the collective, sometimes even using stamps that had

been sanctioned by the guild. To obtain such stamps, entrepre-
neurs entered into fictive apprenticeship contracts, worked in
company with a free master or acquired the stamp of a deceased
master from his widow (usually in exchange for cash), among
other means.31 Only in these cases did the guilds offer resistance.
In their regulations and juridical litigations, they went to great
lengths to secure the connection between the status of master and
the product to be manufactured, prescribing, among other
things, new master tests, hallmarks and additional years of ap-
prenticeship when boundaries became unclear. A dispute among
shoemakers and tanners in seventeenth-century Antwerp offers
an example. The city’s shoemakers and tanners belonged to a
single guild, which led to confusion over who exactly had the
right to tan hides and manufacture shoes. The eventual com-
promise allowed for shoemakers to purchase fresh hides and
have them tanned, provided they had this done by a free tanner.
Tanners in turn could have shoes made, but only by commission-
ing the work to free master shoemakers. The crux of the matter
was that shoemaking and tanning were both done by individuals
who had served apprenticeships and performed master trials, ir-
respective of labour relations and subcontracting.32
It is entirely feasible to approach this situation from an eco-
nomic perspective. Trademarks guaranteed market transparency
and could serve to create a type of ‘brand loyalty’ for urban
29
De Munck, ‘Agency of Branding and the Location of Value’; see also additional
references there.
30
For example, B. Dubbe, Tin en tinnegieters in Nederland (Zeist, 1965), 59, 66–7.
31
De Munck, ‘One Counter and Your Own Account’, 32–9.
32
Bert De Munck, Technologies of Learning: Apprenticeship in Antwerp Guilds from the
Fifteenth Century to the End of the Ancien Régime (Turnhout, 2007), 235.
products. The hallmarks of the guild could in fact be considered

as either a type of government-imposed certification mark
(thereby reinforcing the associated standards of the guild) or a
type of instrument in the hands of merchants (who created brand
names while delegating control to the guild’s governing bodies).
Conversely, from a social and political perspective, the guarantee
of product quality could also be considered as a claim by the
relevant group of producers concerning their privileged political
status. Questions remain, however, as to the nature of the alien-
ation or estrangement these producers tried to resist. At first
sight, the distinction made through their regulations and trade-
marks is reminiscent of the distinction between the German and

English wool industry in Richard Biernacki’s ground-breaking
book The Fabrication of Labor. Biernacki states that the value of
labour could be measured either through the finished product (as
is assumed to have been the case in England) or through the
labour involved in the production process (as in Germany).33
While the value of labour was largely reduced to labour power
(Arbeitskraft) in the German case, English workers considered
themselves subcontractors of some kind who sold their labour
wrapped in wares.
At first sight, the guild-based masters in my research resisted a
shift from the latter to the former situation, but this is paradoxical
in that guilds in the Southern Netherlands were rather strong, like
the guilds in the German industrial regions, while the guilds in the
English case were notoriously weak. However, as we shall see, the
Marxist conceptual framework may be insufficient when it comes
to explaining what was at stake for these guild-based artisans.
While Marxism is itself a product of nineteenth-century (eco-
nomic) thinking, the early modern situation may have been too
complex to frame with Marxist concepts.
III
PRODUCT QUALITY AND INTRINSIC VALUE
Guild-based masters related their privileged status to product
quality in a specific manner. Their collective hallmarks provided
a clear and concrete reference to the product’s intrinsic value, by
33
Richard Biernacki, The Fabrication of Labor: Germany and Britain, 1640–1914
(Berkeley, 1997).
which I refer to the value of the raw materials used to make the
product. These hallmarks guaranteed, for example, that silver
and tin were made according to the correct alloys; that proper
leather was used (that is, a standard piece of the appropriate type
of hide, one that was well oiled, etc.); and that acceptable wood
was utilized (for example, genuine ebony and not merely a type
of wood that resembled it).34 Even in the absence of collective
hallmarks, as was often the case in pottery making, raw materials
played a decisive role in determining product quality. For ex-
ample, the presence of a particular type of clay determined the
nature of majolica, faience and porcelain. In other words, early

modern masters were essentially concerned with the materiality
of their products, albeit not with physical elements such as finish
and design.
In a way, this is paradoxical given the centrality of the appren-
ticeship system for entrance to the guilds. Closer examination,
however, reveals that this preoccupation with matter fits neatly
into the broader cultural and intellectual climate. In the mercan-
tile system, in which trade guilds were an integral element, pre-
cious metals were (notoriously) regarded as values in and of
themselves, particularly up to the sixteenth century (with Jean
Bodin, among others). Yet there is no reason to limit mercantilist
ideas to intellectual thinking about the treasuries of states. First,
given the convertibility of money and precious metals and the fact
that raw materials such as tin, wool and leather were also used for
political purposes, the distinction between precious metals and
other raw materials is, to a certain extent, artificial. Secondly, in
the Southern Netherlands and other places, where the relation-
ship between city and state was a key locus of political tensions,
mercantilism was not only a matter of states. Local prosperity was
also generally considered to be dependent on the extent to which
producers had access to high-quality raw materials. In the
Southern Netherlands and elsewhere, economic prosperity de-
pended on the provision of precious raw materials like English tin,
34
De Munck, ‘Skills, Trust and Changing Consumer Preferences’, 216–17; De
Munck, ‘One Counter and Your Own Account’, 39. In the London leather sector,
Philippe Minard observes a transition from ‘regulated quality’ (based on the quality of
raw materials) to ‘deliberated quality’ (based on conventions): Philippe Minard,
‘Micro-economics of Quality and Social Construction of the Market: Disputes
among the London Leather Trades in the Eighteenth Century’, in Conventions and
Institutions, special issue, suppl. to Historical Social Research, xxxvi, 4 (2011).
English and Spanish (merino) wool, silk from the East or from
Italy, plate glass from the Rhine area, etc.35 Hence, whenever
masters had a share in urban political power, it was not surprising
that their quest for political autonomy and respectability was
inextricably bound to intrinsic product quality.36
In view of this, it can hardly be coincidental that most of the
overarching guilds were composed according to the raw materials
with which the members worked. Thus, cabinetmakers shared a
guild with coopers or carpenters; shoemakers with tanners, cord-
wainers and glove-makers; stonecutters with masons; and so
on.37 There were even institutional clusters and intensive cooper-

ation between the ‘artisans of the body’: artisans, such as jewellers
and wigmakers, whose work involved the health of the body, as
well as its comfort and decoration.38 At first sight, this may be
explained by business-related entanglements or by the necessity
of regulations that extended beyond the various groups within a
single sector.39 Yet, whenever other combinations appear to have
been rational — for example, tailoring and the production of
accessories such as buttons and buckles — an institutionalized
cluster usually did not materialize.40 The crucial link remained
that of raw materials. Even in the case of painters, where it might
be least expected, the nature of the raw materials was the deciding
factor, at least up to and including the fifteenth century. In the late
fifteenth century, painters who were involved in a dispute regard-
ing the activities of a printer argued that ink was a type of paint
35
For example, with regard to the strategic importance of wool as a raw material,
see John H. Munro, ‘Spanish Merino Wools and the Nouvelles Draperies: An Industrial
Transformation in the Late Medieval Low Countries’, Economic History Review, lviii, 3
(2005).
36
Besides the Southern Netherlands, this was surely the case in northern Italy. See,
for example, Barbara Bettoni, ‘Usefulness, Ornament and Novelty: The Debate on
Quality in Button and Buckle Manufacturing in Northern Italy, XVIII–XIX Century’,
in Bert De Munck and Dries Lyna (eds.), Concepts of Value in Material Culture, 1500–
1900 (forthcoming).
37
For the Netherlands, this insight is based upon an extensive database concerning
the establishment of trade guilds, which can currently be consulted at Institutions for
Collective Action, at5http://www.collective-action.info4(accessed 10 Apr. 2014).
38
Sandra Cavallo, Artisans of the Body in Early Modern Italy: Identities, Families and
Masculinities (Manchester, 2007), ch. 3.
39
See, for example, Carlo Poni, ‘Local Market Rules and Practices: Three Guilds in
the Same Line of Production in Early Modern Bologna’, in Stuart Woolf (ed.),
Domestic Strategies: Work and Family in France and Italy, 1600–1800 (Cambridge,
1991).
40
For example, Bettoni, ‘Usefulness, Ornament and Novelty’.
and that the printer in question was therefore obliged to hold
membership in the Guild of St Luke.41 Finally, the history of
the nomenclature used for crafts and professions also clearly
indicates a shift from basic materials to production tech-
niques and the use of products during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries.42
Nor should the application of hallmarks necessarily be reduced
to a need for market transparency. In his book on anthropological
theories concerning value,43 David Graeber draws a distinction
between two forms of power: power that can be exercised directly
over others and power that consists of persuading others to treat
you in a particular way. The theories to which Graeber refers

include those concerning gender relationships and the differences
between the ‘abstractly’ attired bourgeois man (who holds direct
power) and the woman bedecked with jewels and accessories
(who holds indirect power); yet it is also a distinction between
money (an invisible power) and merchandise (visible power).
Therefore, given that both money and merchandise can theoret-
ically be transformed one into the other, goods that have intrinsic
value are situated within an intriguing area of tension between
invisible potential and display. For a period in which the founda-
tions of political power were gradually shifting from monarchs
and princes (who sought to impress through pomp and ostenta-
tion) towards a situation in which power was more anonymous
and bureaucratic (yet also became more dependent upon the
availability of capital), it is thus difficult not to understand the
application of hallmarks as a political and ideological act, and one
closely related to value.
In fact, the collective hallmarks of artisans, almost without ex-
ception, contained reference to the host city’s coat of arms, thus
making each hallmark a sort of political statement.44 Moreover,
as entrance to a guild was conditional upon the acquisition of
urban citizenship, the application of a collective hallmark also
implied a political and moral commitment to the city as a political
41
Jan van der Stock, Printing Images in Antwerp: The Introduction of Printmaking in
a City, Fifteenth Century to 1585 (Rotterdam, 1998), 29.
42
Bernard Guibert, Jean Laganier and Michel Volle, ‘Essai sur les nomenclatures
industrielles’, Économie et statistique, xx (1971), cited in Alain Desrosières, ‘The
Economics of Convention and Statistics: The Paradox of Origins’, Historical Social
Research, xxxvi, 4 (2011), 67.
43
See n. 8.
44
References in De Munck, ‘Agency of Branding and the Location of Value’.
community.45 This is exemplified in the guilds’ rituals and cere-

monies. In addition to referring to the city’s coat of arms in their
collective hallmarks, artisans, when participating in marches and
processions, carried images of their products and the production
process. As such, guild-based masters connected their political
status to intrinsic value quite consciously and concretely in the
public sphere. Products and instruments were often depicted in
the images of the guild’s patron saints, and images of tools or
products usually appeared in a central position in their own
coats of arms, against backgrounds that evoked noble heritage.46
Of course, at first glance it could still be argued that this was all
about monetary gain or political prestige. Yet, rather than setting

these mercantilist and moral and ritualistic positions aside (as
either irrelevant or anachronistic), we should first ask why (cer-
tain) raw materials were considered valuable. Likewise, the his-
toriographical rehabilitation of the craft guilds on an economic
basis should not lead us to forget that the guilds were a type of
fraternity with important religious dimensions.47 Indeed, many
historians have discussed the importance of metaphors and sym-
bols referring to the body of Christ and the bodies of the saints in
early modern society.48 Thus, craft guilds, which in Catholic ter-
ritories continued to attach great importance to their patron
45
See, for example, Marc Boone, ‘Droit de bourgeoisie et particularisme urbain
dans la Flandre bourguignonne et habsbourgeoise, 1384–1585’, Belgisch tijdschrift
voor filologie en geschiedenis, lxxiv (1996); An Kint, ‘Becoming Civic Community:
Citizenship in Sixteenth-Century Antwerp’, in Marc Boone and Maarten Prak
(eds.), Individual, Corporate and Judicial Status in European Cities, Late Middle Ages
and Early Modern Period (Leuven, 1996); Marc Boone, ‘ ‘‘Cette frivole, dampnable et
desraisonnable bourgeoisie’’: de vele gezichten van het laat-middeleeuws burgerbe-
grip in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden’, in Joost Kloek and Karin Tilmans (eds.), Burger:
een geschiedenis van het begrip ‘burger’ in de Nederlanden van de Middeleeuwen tot de 21ste
eeuw (Amsterdam, 2002).
46
Bert De Munck, ‘Erfgoed is van alle tijden: ambachten en hun beeldcultuur in het
Ancien Régime’, in A. Vandewalle (ed.), Te wapen! Heraldiek, teken van gezag en iden-
titeit (Bruges, 2004); Bert De Munck, ‘From Religious Devotion to Commercial
Ambition? Some Marginal Notes on the Religious Material Culture of the Antwerp
Crafts in the Sixteenth Century’, in Ria Fabri (ed.), From Quinten Metsijs to Peter Paul
Rubens: Masterpieces from the Royal Museum Reunited in the Cathedral (Antwerp, 2009).
47
For the Southern Netherlands, see Alfons K. L. Thijs, ‘Religion and Social
Structure: Religious Rituals in Pre-industrial Trade Associations in the Low
Countries’, in Maarten Prak et al. (eds.), Craft Guilds in the Early Modern Low
Countries: Work, Power, and Representation (London, 2006).
48
For example, Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘The Sacred and the Body Social in
Sixteenth-Century Lyon’, Past and Present, no. 90 (Feb. 1981); James Mervyn,
‘Ritual, Drama and Social Body in the Late Medieval English town’, Past and
Present, no. 98 (Feb. 1983), pp. 3–29.
saints, can be seen as a body (corps de métier) that comprised the
physical and political bodies of the artisans.49 This is perhaps
why the bodies of the artisans were in a sense made public as
well. Craft guilds obliged their members to work in their front
rooms, in view of customers and under the watchful eyes of deans
and other authority figures. Working in attics, cellars and back
rooms was considered professionally inferior and suspect.
In principle, this can again be seen from a purely instrumental
and utilitarian standpoint — that is, as an attempt to prevent
fraud — but, as was the case with raw materials, the importance
of the artisan’s body can be linked to the broader and more
fundamental world-view of guild-based masters. Guild members

did not consider their work to be a process of purely instrumental,
human creation. While initiation into a trade and thus the
handling of the raw materials occurred alongside a process of
becoming a respectable citizen and, therefore, the reproduction
of a particular world-view,50 the perception of both product
value and labour were related to religious, spiritual and ideolo-
gical sensibilities. The purely instrumental approach would
appear to be one we have inherited from Enlightenment
thinking, but which continues to obscure what was at stake for
the artisans themselves.51
IV
INTRINSIC VALUE AND THE BODY OF THE ARTISAN FROM AN
ENLIGHTENMENT PERSPECTIVE
Perceptions about the early modern guilds changed dramatically
from about the mid seventeenth century onwards.52 In their
49
James R. Farr, Artisans in Europe, 1300–1914 (Cambridge, 2000), 258–60. See
also Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997), 114.
50
Recent views and references in Maarten Prak, ‘Moral Order in the World of
Work: Social Control and the Guilds in Europe’, in Herman Roodenburg and
Pieter Spierenburg (eds.), Social Control in Europe, i, 1500–1800 (Columbus, 2004);
Bert De Munck, ‘From Brotherhood Community to Civil Society? Apprentices be-
tween Guild, Household and the Freedom of Contract in Early Modern Antwerp’,
Social History, xxxv, 1 (2010).
51
Recent views on long-term transformations in the perception of labour
(including additional references) in Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, Worthy Efforts:
Attitudes to Work and Workers in Pre-industrial Europe (Leiden, 2012), esp. ch. 6.
52
One of the very first pamphlets against the trade monopolies appeared in the mid
seventeenth century. It is no coincidence that it appeared in the Northern
Netherlands, where traders (and not guild-based masters) were strong. J. Lucassen,
(cont. on p. 56)
diatribes against guild regulations, eighteenth-century adminis-

trators in central state organizations such as the Privy Council in
Brussels frequently referred to the ideas of French Physiocrats
and eighteenth-century Scottish political philosophers in a famil-
iar discourse on the necessity to debunk the guilds’ ‘privileges’.
But while it is tempting to reduce this conflict to one between a
regulated and a deregulated economy, the underlying perspective
on quality and skills is in fact far more complex. One recurrent
argument was that because customers were perfectly able to make
their own judgements about product quality, guild regulations
and hallmarks were not needed. Buyers could scrutinize products

themselves and thus act somewhat like individual inspectors.53
Another classic accusation levelled against artisans who were
organized into craft guilds was that they scrupulously kept secret
the ‘mysteries of the trade’. An opposition was couched between,
on one hand, artisans and guilds who jealously protected and
monopolized their trade secrets and, on the other, technical know-
ledge to be acquired and applied at one’s own discretion.54
However, Enlightenment thinking reveals a certain paradox
here. While trade secrets were made public and the utility of the
mechanical arts was highlighted (as in the case of the well-known
Encyclopédie), labour and skills ultimately came to be placed on
an equal footing with machinery and instruments.55 This was,
(n. 52 cont.)
‘Het Welvaren van Leiden, 1659–1662: de wording van een economische theorie over
gilden en ondernemerschap’, in Boudien de Vries et al. (eds.), De kracht der zwakken:
studies over arbeid en arbeidersbeweging in het verleden (Amsterdam, 1992); Karel Davids,
‘From De La Court to Vreede: Regulation and Self-Regulation in Dutch Economic
Discourse from c.1600 to the Napoleonic Era’, Journal of European Economic History,
xxx (2001).
53
For example, Minard, ‘Micro-economics of Quality and Social Construction of
the Market’, 155. There are similar arguments in Jean-Jacques Heirwegh, ‘Les
Corporations dans les Pays-Bas autrichiens, 1738–1784’ (Université Libre de
Bruxelles doctoral thesis, 1981).
54
For a more nuanced view, see Pamela O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship:
Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore,
2001).
55
Cynthia J. Koepp, ‘The Alphabetical Order: Work in Diderot’s Encyclopédie’, and
William H. Sewell Jr, ‘Visions of Labor: Illustrations of the Mechanical Arts before, in,
and after Diderot’s Encyclopédie’, both in Steven Laurence Kaplan and Cynthia J.
Koepp (eds.), Work in France: Representations, Meaning, Organization, and Practice
(Ithaca, 1980); Simon Schaffer, ‘Enlightened Automata’, in William Clark, Jan
Golinski and Simon Schaffer (eds.), The Sciences in Enlightened Europe (Chicago,
1999). See also Pascal Dubourg Glatigny and Hélène Vérin (eds.), Réduire en art: la
technologie de la Renaissance aux Lumières (Paris, 2008).
notoriously, the view of Adam Smith, who argued that ‘The im-
proved dexterity of a workman may be considered in the same
light as a machine or instrument of trade which facilitates and
abridges labour, and which, though it costs a certain expense,
repays that expense with a profit’.56 In 1782 the renowned
entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood, who actively sought new ways to
discipline the workforce and use labour more efficiently, advised
James Watt to handle and manage his own body like ‘any other
machine under your direction’.57 Artisans were thus down-
graded into a kind of sophisticated automaton. In contrast to
the artisans’ views, therefore, labour and skills became reified
and detached from the social, political and religious context.

At least in part, these views explain why the guilds’ actions
today often seem to have been irrational. For example, one of
the most persistent problems guild boards faced was the prolifer-
ation of products that combined different types of raw material.
There appeared on the markets increasing numbers of products
that, because they were made from various types of raw material,
transcended guild boundaries. These products included earthen-
ware pots with tin lids, belts with silver fittings and shoes with
metal buckles. It was around such products that the most prom-
inent litigation unfolded between the guild-based masters
who adhered to collective hallmarks and the wholesalers and
merchants who no longer applied hallmarks, or who applied
them without holding guild membership.58 This shift is par-
ticularly apparent in conflicts involving metal trade guilds,
which defended intrinsic value against technologies that em-
ployed other materials to imitate the effects of silver and other
precious materials.59
Once again, however, there is more to the story. Until at least
the sixteenth century, it had not been irrational to defend the
guilds’ privileges against infringements made by large entrepre-
neurs whose products combined different raw materials. At least
until the end of the sixteenth century, each new industry in a city
56
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776;
2nd edn, London, 1778), bk II, p. 335.
57
Cited in Schaffer, ‘Enlightened Automata’, 150.
58
De Munck, ‘One Counter and Your Own Account’, 38. For further references,
see De Munck, ‘Skills, Trust and Changing Consumer Preferences’.
59
For example, Helen Clifford, ‘Concepts of Invention, Identity and Imitation in
the London and Provincial Metal-Working Trades’, Journal of Design History, xii, 3
(1999); Bettoni, ‘Usefulness, Ornament and Novelty’.
was almost automatically incorporated into a guild, as was the

case with Antwerp’s first ebony workers, who were subsumed
within the cabinetmakers’ guild around 1600.60 By the early
eighteenth century, such incorporations no longer happened.
Indeed, attempts were made to undermine the guilds’ monopoly
by, for example, granting merchants exemptions from appren-
ticeship requirements.61 At first glance, this may appear to have
been simply a basic process of deregulation, but in fact a funda-
mental shift was occurring in the relationship between product
quality and the economic actors involved. The agency in the
defining and warranting of product quality shifted to retailers,

mercers and other parties, who had begun to involve them-
selves in product design and eventually began to adopt their
own hallmarks.62
Given that product quality was until then guaranteed by the
manufacturers’ qualité or état, the relationship between skills (in
the broadest sense) and materiality was a crucial element in this
transformation. One of the first fault-lines in corporative logic
was the separation of artists from artisans. In Antwerp around
1600, the stonecutters separated from the guild of the Four
Crowned (to which the masons also belonged), because they
wished to distance themselves from the ‘rough handiwork’ of
the other guild members.63 They opted to affiliate with the
Guild of St Luke, which cultivated the liberal arts tradition, or
at least the idea that artists are intellectuals whose genius and
60
De Munck, Technologies of Learning, 64, 76.
61
For the Southern Netherlands, see H. Van Houtte, Histoire économique de
la Belgique à la fin de l’ancien régime (Ghent, 1920), pt I, ch. 2.
62
Eric Turner, ‘Silver Plating in the Eighteenth Century’, in Susan La Niece and
Paul Craddock (eds.), Metal Plating and Patination: Cultural, Technical and Historical
Developments (Oxford, 1993), 219; Clifford, ‘Concepts of Invention, Identity and
Imitation in the London and Provincial Metal-Working Trades’, 242–8; David
Mitchell, ‘Innovation and the Transfer of Skill in the Goldsmiths’ Trade in
Restoration London’, 13, and Helen Clifford, ‘ ‘‘The King’s Arms and Feathers’’: A
Case Study Exploring the Networks of Manufacture Operating in the London
Goldsmiths’ Trade in the Eighteenth Century’, 89, both in David Mitchell (ed.),
Goldsmiths, Silversmiths and Bankers: Innovation and Transfer of Skill, 1500–1750
(Stroud, 1995); Carolyn Sargentson, ‘The Manufacture and Marketing of Luxury
Goods: The Marchands Merciers of Late Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Paris’,
in Robert Fox and Anthony J. Turner (eds.), Luxury Trades and Consumerism in
Ancient Régime Paris: Studies in the History of the Skilled Workforce (Aldershot, 1998).
63
Zirka Zaremba Filipczak, Picturing Art in Antwerp, 1550–1700 (Princeton, 1987),
11–19; see also further references there.
talent are superior to the manual skills of manual workers.64 This
process was, on the surface, part of a broader evolution in which
manual labour was increasingly regarded as inferior to intellectual
skills and the ability to invent. However, we should be careful not
to project our contemporary ideas about handicraft onto those of
early modern artisans. Indeed, intrinsic value was guaranteed not
by the craftwork or virtuosity of the professionals (despite the
importance of the apprenticeship period and the master test)
but rather by their moral qualities. It was the honesty of the
guild-based masters which guaranteed that their metal products
had been manufactured with proper alloys and that proper lea-

thers and woods had been used.
Moreover, not only were intrinsic value and the moral super-
iority of guild-based masters related to a certain ‘common good’
— the bien commun of the city;65 they also possessed a religious
dimension. While the guilds’ products, instruments and bodies
were depicted in their paintings and banners along with their
patron saints, the religious dimension had its impact on their
ideas about product quality and the honourableness of
their work. As art historians have explained, producing should
not necessarily be regarded as a process in which the artisans’
artefacts imitated or surpassed the products of nature. What
was often at issue was imitation not of effects but of causes
(that is, natural processes of generation), whereby imitations of
gems and other precious stones could be deemed acceptable be-
cause the artists crafting them were subject to the same ‘powers
of heaven’ as were geological processes.66 The missing element
necessary for a more effective understanding of the guild-based
masters’ preoccupations and sensitivities is thus the mysterious
64
Bert De Munck, ‘Corpses, Live Models, and Nature: Assessing Skills and
Knowledge before the Industrial Revolution (Case: Antwerp)’, Technology and
Culture, li, 2 (2010), esp. 342–8. Even as early as 1600 this was not a new trend: see
Smith, ‘Artists as Scientists’, 15. See also Nikolaus Pevsner, Academies of Art, Past and
Present (Cambridge, 1940).
65
A recent status quaestionis concerning the definition of the common good by
urban groups is presented in Élodie Lecuppre-Desjardin and Anne-Laure Van
Bruaene (eds.), De Bono Communi: The Discourse and Practice of the Common Good in
the European City (13th–16th c.) (Turnhout, 2010).
66
For example, Spike Bucklow, ‘The Virtues of Imitation: Gems, Cameos
and Glass Imitations’, in Paul Binski and Ann Massing (eds.), The Westminster
Retable: History, Technique, Conservation (London, 2009); Smith, ‘Artists as
Scientists’, 18.
character of both matter and the body of the artisan in the medi-
eval and early modern period.
As Pamela Smith has noted, the professional knowledge of a
goldsmith or silversmith did not differ greatly from that of an
alchemist. Alchemy served as a language for artisans to articulate
their working processes, and alchemy, goldsmithing and silver-
smithing were predicated on the religious mysteries of the cos-
mos.67 In each instance, it was understood that the relevant
creative potential was partly to be found in matter itself. The
artisans’ rituals offer a glimpse of this attitude in the obligation
of goldsmiths, silversmiths and tinsmiths to test the alloy on the
occasion of the master test. While this was necessary for preven-

tion of fraud and inferior work, it also served as a moment in
which the wonders of nature became visible.68
Pamela Smith’s work in particular has shown that, for six-
teenth-century scientists such as Paracelsus, knowledge was not
the consequence of reason; rather, it was a sort of fusion of the
divine powers of mind, body and soul with the divine power of
matter. Thus, science (scientia) was partly dependent on a kind of
divine power inherent within the things themselves.69 For man-
ufacturing artisans, this implies that artefacts derived their value
not from specific expertise or virtuosity but from the way they
were related to, on one hand, the wonders of the universe or ‘the
Book of Nature’ and, on the other, the divinely inspired body of
the artisans.70 Here, then, we see the importance of not allowing
analysis to proceed immediately from the assumption of some
kind of ‘modern’ individual or from a semiotic approach, for in
each of these, objects are subjected to a representational order
from the start.71
Saussure’s central idea that the relationship between the signi-
fier and the signified is based upon convention (rather than
67
Smith, ‘Artists as Scientists’, 19. See also Smith, Body of the Artisan; Pamela H.
Smith, ‘Vermilion, Mercury, Blood and Lizards: Matter and Meaning in
Metalworking’, in Ursula Klein and E. C. Spary (eds.), Materials and Expertise
in Early Modern Europe: Between Market and Laboratory (Chicago, 2010).
68
De Munck, Technologies of Learning, 74, 81, 245–6.
69
Smith, ‘Artists as Scientists’, 17.
70
Ibid.; Smith, ‘Vital Spirits’. See also Lorraine J. Daston, ‘The Factual
Sensibility’, Isis, lxxix, 3 (1988), esp. 456–8.
71
For a good example of such a ‘cultural’ approach, see Grant McCracken,
‘Culture and Consumption: A Theoretical Account of the Structure and Movement
of the Cultural Meaning of Consumer Goods’, Journal of Consumer Research, xiii
(1986).
necessity), and that the signified is nothing more than a concept
(rather than reality), may itself have been a product of the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries. As early as John Locke, the re-
lationship between sign and meaning was seen as conventional
(‘arbitrary’, in Locke’s terminology), such that there was no
natural or necessary connection between them. While the linguis-
tic sign was regarded as the representation of a prelinguistic idea,
language came to be seen as the result of the human facility to
impose artificial names on things (whether or not they were
constrained in this by ‘nature’ or the historical context).72 In
Bruno Latour’s terminology, both Locke’s approach and post-
structuralism (in which Saussure’s ideas have been overwhelm-

ing) could thus be seen as part of a purification process in which
materiality and the agency of objects became subordinated to the
meaning that Cartesian subjects attached to such objects.
V
PRODUCTS AS GIFTS (AND ECONOMIC RELATIONSHIPS AS
PATRONAGE RELATIONSHIPS)
How, then, can we proceed so as to take into account effectively
the materiality and agency of objects and the attitudes and sensi-
tivities towards objects and materiality held by artisans? Marxist
thinking on alienation and commodity fetishism may take us a
long way, although the connection between, on one hand, what I
have described as intrinsic value and, on the other, use value and
concrete labour could become a brainteaser. Following Marx, the
physical origin of the products and the material nature of social
relations are mystified through what he called ‘commodity fetish-
ism’. But how to understand this in the context of (strong) guilds?
Were guild-based products commodities, or did guilds prevent
their products from becoming commodities?
While guild-based masters may have resisted a certain type of
alienation, they did not, of course, guard a ‘real’ connection with
materiality. We might say that the guild-based masters’ connec-
tion with materiality was just as imaginary as is assumed when
72
Avi Lifschitz, ‘The Arbitrariness of the Linguistic Sign: Variations on an
Enlightenment Theme’, Journal of the History of Ideas, lxxiii, 4 (2012). See also
Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and
Intellectual History (London, 1982).
using the label ‘commodity fetishism’.73 On the other hand, they

did forge a connection between their social position and their
products’ value that escapes both a classical economic framework
and the concepts of use value and concrete labour. Here, an-
thropological theories that return to the gift theory of Marcel
Mauss, which anthropologists consider complementary to the
theories of Marx (specifically, the value theories),74 may perhaps
be helpful. For Mauss, the founder (along with Durkheim and
Malinowski) of philosophical theories concerning gifts and
reciprocity, exchanged objects and artefacts are never completely
separated from their givers. The spirit of the giver remains
essentially present in the gift, and this esprit is associated with

the social status of the giver. The ‘value’ of the giver (and thus
the value of the gift) is determined by the giver’s political status
and the place that he or she occupies within a given hierarchy and
tradition; these factors also determine which gifts should be
expected in return.
Given that historians associate gifts with political clientelism
and charity, not with economic interactions,75 it may seem
far-fetched to associate finished products with a gift culture.
Anthropologists, however, take a different view. They study the
transition, or at least the tension, between gift exchange (oriented
towards reciprocity) and commodity exchange (oriented towards
profit).76 Recent research places the strict distinction between gift
and commodity in danger of collapse. According to Arjun
73
Compare Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York, 1989); William
Pietz, ‘Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in Marx’, in Emily Apter and
William Pietz (eds.), Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (Ithaca, 1993), 125–6.
74
Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, ch. 4; Elizabeth Emma Ferry,
‘Fetishism and Hauism in Central Mexico: Using Marx and Mauss to Understand
Commodity Production in a Cooperative Setting’, Research in Economic Anthropology,
xxii (2003).
75
See, for example, Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France
(Madison, 2000); Arnout-Jan Bijsterveld, ‘The Medieval Gift as Agent of Social
Bonding and Political Power: A Comparative Approach’, in E. Cohen and M. B. de
Jong (eds.), Medieval Transformations: Texts, Power, and Gifts in Context (Leiden, 2001);
Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, The Culture of Giving: Informal Support and Gift-Exchange
in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2008). For recent perspectives and further
references, see Martha C. Howell, Commerce before Capitalism in Europe, 1300–1600
(Cambridge, 2010), ch. 3. For gifts of early modern trade guilds in the Southern
Netherlands, see Frederik Verleysen, ‘Het hemelse festijn: religieuze cultuur, sociabi-
liteit en sociale relaties in de corporatieve wereld van Antwerpen, Brussel en Gent, ca.
1585–ca. 1795’ (Vrije Universiteit Brussel doctoral thesis, 2005).
76
For an introduction to the anthropological literature, see Alan D. Schrift (ed.),
The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity (New York, 1997).
Appadurai, whether certain objects are gifts or commodities is not
determined in advance. It depends upon the context in which the
objects circulate and it can change throughout the life cycle of the
object in question. For example, a standardized, mass-produced
product can end up in a museum, thus ceasing to be a commodity.
Conversely, gift-like artefacts can be transformed into commod-
ities, when, for example, they are purchased by tourists.
Appadurai argues, in other words, that objects and artefacts
have a potential to become commodities and that they may well
undergo a ‘commodity phase’.77 At first glance, this may appear
far removed from the early modern commodity circuits; however,

according to Marshall Sahlins, whether or not an object will
become a commodity depends upon the circuit in question.78
Sahlins argues that gifts are exchanged within networks of friends
and relatives, whereas commodities are exchanged within net-
works of strangers. If we then picture a continuum with an
anonymous market at one extreme and the exchange of gifts
among friends and relatives at the other, early modern long-
term relationships between producers and traders, within a con-
text of patronage networks that still functioned effectively, would
occupy a position in the middle. It is thus far from inconceivable
that early modern merchandise had gift-like qualities.
It is, of course, not at all clear to what extent this can be framed
in terms of the ‘agency’ of objects, let alone the agency of materi-
ality. But compared to Marxist (and post-structuralist) theories,
the gift concept allows us to take into account a more complex
relationship between the object and its manufacturer owing to its
connection to the multidimensional moral, political and religious
context. In Annette Weiner’s widely cited book Inalienable
Possessions, attention is moreover shifted away from circulation
and onto the objects and artefacts themselves. Reciprocity
networks and markets share a common element in that the
value of objects results from their ‘equivalency’ to other objects —
equivalency which, in the case of market exchanges, is realized
through money (and abstract labour). In this reading, therefore,
the exchanged (or unexchanged) objects once again do not
77
Arjun Appadurai, ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’; see
also Igor Kopytoff, ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as
Process’, both in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in
Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, 1986).
78
Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (London, 1974), chs. 4 and 5.
matter.79 For Weiner, however, the standing of a group is less

likely to be determined by reciprocity than it is by the aspects of
the gifts that remain inalienable and which thus impart stature or
importance to the characteristics of a particular group. In this
regard, the fact that certain objects are not bestowed as gifts
(because they are inalienable) is less of an issue than is the process
of ‘keeping-while-giving’.80 The essential point is that an object in
some sense remains in the possession of the giver, even when it is
in circulation, that is, has been bestowed (or sold). The giver (or
seller) of the product does not, then, completely relinquish the
product.81 While the object is circulating, the identity of the pro-

ducer remains intimately associated with it and retains a certain
control over its meaning.
From this perspective, hallmarks can be seen as instrumental in
anchoring the spirit of the giver to the product, that is, as attempts
by guild-based masters to make their labour and status visible.
Conversely, the spirit of the giver can be regarded as the product’s
quality, itself based on the giver’s moral and political status.
Through their marked products, early modern producers of tin,
silver, wood and leather products can be seen as sending their
‘fame’ to the world, as did the inhabitants of Gawa (an island
south-west of Papua New Guinea), as described in a landmark
study by the anthropologist Nancy Munn.82 Application of a col-
lective hallmark thus became a signal to traders and customers to
treat guild-based masters with appropriate consideration, while
the products in question (from this perspective) provided for the
reproduction of the patronage relationship, as well as for the gen-
eration of financial return, as well as respect and consideration,
for both parties.83
In short, the products of guild-based masters should be viewed
not only as the fruits of the masters’ labours (in either concrete or
abstract terms), but also, and primarily, as fundamentally asso-
ciated with the masters’ moral, religious and political qualities in
79
Annette B. Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-while-Giving
(Berkeley, 1992).
80
Myers, ‘Introduction’, 12–17.
81
Maurice Godelier, L’Énigme du don (Paris, 1996), 74.
82
Nancy D. Munn, The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a
Massim (Papua New Guinea) Society (Durham, NC, 1992). See also Ferry, ‘Fetishism
and Hauism in Central Mexico’.
83
Next to merchants, customers who provided the raw materials themselves (for
example, in the context of tailors) can be seen as a type of ‘patron’.
the specific urban context they worked in and in which they were
politically active. The difference between commodities and
‘gifted products’ is that the value of the objects in the former
sense is related to the forgetting (becoming invisible) of the his-
tory of its manufacturing, whereas in the latter case that history is
retained and made visible.84 From a gift perspective, the opposite
of merchandise is not the artwork or the bartered object of ex-
change but the heirloom, the value of which depends upon the
status of its current and former owners. The application of a hall-
mark thus becomes an act in which a commodity (to a certain
level) is promoted to the status of heirloom, the value of which
depends upon the standing of the master.

VI
TOWARDS AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE?
A second possible new approach relates to a connection between
economic value, and epistemic shifts. The alleged transition from
intrinsic value (in ‘old luxury’) to design, style and fashion as the
foundation for product quality (‘new luxury’) is a familiar topos in
the history of consumption.85 This shift can be seen as materiality
losing importance, yet the approach taken by Jan de Vries and
others is classical economic in nature, in that they reduce the issue
to the relative cost of the raw materials. My approach is different
in that I examine not only the socio-economic, but also the pol-
itical, cultural and, last but not least, epistemic shifts that may
have caused the growing importance of ‘sign value’ over ‘intrinsic
value’.
Up to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, references to
individual masters, the city and intrinsic value had often
merged into a single collective hallmark. This was the case
within the Antwerp pewter industry, in which finished products
were often stamped with an image of the Antwerp fortress,
84
Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, 105. See also Wim
Binsbergen, ‘Commodification: Things, Agency, and Identities: Introduction’, in
van Binsbergen and Geschiere (eds.), Commodification, 36–44.
85
See Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household
Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge, 2008), ch. 4, esp. p. 146. One excellent case
study is by Helen Clifford, ‘A Commerce with Things: The Value of Precious
Metalwork in Early Modern England’, in Berg and Clifford (eds.), Consumers and
Luxury.
proclaiming the intrinsic value of the product, and within which

was contained the master’s initials. The Tudor Rose (signalling
the English origins of the tin) was used in a similar manner, as
were references to both the master (for example, his initials) and
the coat of arms (for example, the Antwerp hand) of the city in
question. By the nineteenth century — and, in a sense, in any
contexts in which guild-based masters lost (or never had) control
over marking — hallmarks referred no longer to the collective
features of a group of producers but either to individual firms
or to organs dominated by the government (as in the case of cer-
tificates).86 This transformation was linked not so much to the

dissolution of the guilds as it was to the process through which the
importance of intrinsic value and the political status of a privi-
leged group of producers (including the connection between in-
trinsic value and political standing) gradually became less self-
evident. Decades before the dissolution of the guilds at the end of
the eighteenth century, products were already being fully labelled
not only with the name of the producers but also with the origin
and quality of the raw materials (for example, ‘English blocktin’)
and the name of the city in which they had been produced
(for example, ‘made in’ Antwerp, Brussels or London), thus
essentially eliminating the need for corporative regulations and
statutes, and dissolving the link between master, intrinsic value
and city.87
In addition, systems of meaning were developed that existed
separately from the product (for example, advertisements, trade
cards and catalogues) and in which product value depended in
part upon the semantic field in which it emerged.88 Something
86
For a case study involving tableware (pottery, tin and silver), see De Munck, ‘The
Agency of Branding and the Location of Value’. See also Ilja Van Damme, ‘From a
‘‘Knowledgeable’’ Salesman towards a ‘‘Recognizable’’ Product: Questioning
Branding Strategies before Industrialization’, in De Munck and Lyna (eds.),
Concepts of Value in Material Culture.
87
References in De Munck, ‘Agency of Branding and the Location of Value’.
88
For example, N. McKendrick, ‘Josiah Wedgwood: An Eighteenth-Century
Entrepreneur in Salesmanship and Marketing Techniques’, Economic History
Review, xxii, 3 (1960); E. Robinson, ‘Eighteenth-Century Commerce and Fashion:
Matthew Boulton’s Marketing Techniques’, Economic History Review, xvi, 1 (1963);
Neil McKendrick, ‘George Packwood and the Commercialization of Shaving: The
Art of Eighteenth-Century Advertising, or, ‘‘The Way to Get Money and Be Happy’’ ’,
in Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb (eds.), The Birth of a Consumer
Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1982); Claire
Walsh, ‘The Advertising and Marketing of Consumer Goods in Eighteenth-Century
(cont. on p. 67)
similar occurs when products are displayed in a store, a process by
which the value of a product essentially comes to depend upon its
place in a taxonomy of products.89 A common feature of these
shifts is that the value of the product has become dependent on an
external system of meaning and on consumers’ visual percep-
tions. In the terminology of Philippe Minard, there was a shift
away from supply-side economics towards demand-side eco-
nomics, but one could argue that, on a less abstract level, the
spirit (‘quality’ or ‘status’) of the artisans had disappeared from
the product while intrinsic quality has become less important.90
The possible link with epistemological transformations becomes

apparent when connecting value to meaning and the economic
perspective to the ‘archaeology’ of knowledge.
The shift from intrinsic value to the importance of display, the
assimilation of products into a visual taxonomy and the construc-
tion of external discourses on product quality (in short, the im-
portance of a remote Cartesian subject who assigns meaning
visually and discursively) are reminiscent of Michel Foucault’s
description of the epistemological turn during what he termed
the classical period. According to Foucault, during the
Renaissance objects provided a sort of magical access to the
underlying Truth, just as words did. The secrets of the world
could essentially be deciphered through objects and artefacts
(that is, naturalia and artificialia), which always led towards the
same truth, for God had in a sense left his signature upon them
when he created the world. Similitude and outward resemblance
were the prime principles through which connection was estab-
lished between, on one hand, words and objects and, on the other,
a deeper ‘intrinsic’ truth. Foucault sets this period in opposition
to the classical period, which he situates between 1650 and 1800.
(n. 88 cont.)
London’, in Clemens Wischerman and Elliot Shore (eds.), Advertising and the
European City: Historical Perspectives (Aldershot, 2000).
89
For example, Claire Walsh, ‘Shop Design and the Display of Goods in
Eighteenth-Century London’, Journal of Design History, viii, 3 (1995); Andrew
Hann and Jon Stobart, ‘Sites of Consumption: The Display of Goods in Provincial
Shops in Eighteenth-Century England’, Cultural and Social History, ii, 2 (2005). For
recent perspectives and further references on retail practices, see Bruno Blondé et al.
(eds.), Buyers and Sellers: Retail Circuits and Practices in Medieval and Early Modern
Europe (Turnhout, 2006).
90
Philippe Minard, ‘Les Corporations en France aux XVIIIe siècle: métiers et in-
stitutions’, in Steven L. Kaplan and Philippe Minard (eds.), La France, malade du
corporatisme? XVIIIe–XXe siècles (Paris, 2004).
From about the mid seventeenth century, according to Foucault,

man-made orders of signs founded knowledge and created truth.
The principles of similitude and resemblance were replaced with
the principles of difference and comparison, of which there were
two forms: mathesis (measurement) and taxonomia (order).
Moreover, while the identity of things was searched for by order-
ing them and visually observing their differences, a language was
constructed that made possible the representation of thought.91
As is well known, these theories have inspired a range of re-
search in early modern history, including the history of collecting
and classifying natural history specimens.92 But the history of

economic thinking can be linked to it as well, as suggested by
Iara Vigo de Lima. Over the course of the seventeenth century,
and culminating at the beginning of the eighteenth, money ceased
to be valued because of its ‘resemblance’ to that which it signified:
wealth. In the ‘age of resemblance’, the function of money as a
measurement of price rested upon its intrinsic material value. In
other words, money was able to function as a sign because it had
value ‘in its own right’. Later, when paper money came to replace
coin, money was reduced to a sign, which, while economically
serving as a pledge, could ‘represent’ wealth as something apart
from that which it resembled.93 Similar ideas are in turn con-
nected to ideas about the value of the sign and language in the
fields of literature and philosophy, with scholars stressing the
formal similarities between linguistic and economic symboliza-
tion.94 To be sure, this is again inspired more by Marx and
Saussure than it is by Foucault, but my point is simply that
91
Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris,
1966); Michel Foucault, L’archéologie du savoir (Paris, 1969).
92
See, for example, Susan M. Pearce, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting
in the European Tradition (London, 1995); Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the
Shaping of Knowledge (London, 1992); Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History,
Theory, Politics (London, 1995); Emma Spary, ‘Codes of Passion: Natural History
Specimens as a Polite Language in Late Eighteenth-Century France’, in Hans Erich
Bödecker, Peter Hans Reill and Jürgen Schlumbohm (eds.), Wissenschaft als kulturelle
Praxis, 1750–1900 (Göttingen, 1999); Ursula Klein, ‘Shifting Ontologies, Changing
Classifications: Plant Materials from 1700 to 1830’, Studies in History and Philosophy of
Science, xxxvi (2005).
93
See Iara Vigo de Lima, Foucault’s Archaeology of Political Economy (Basingstoke,
2010).
94
For example, Louis Marin, La Critique du discours: sur la ‘Logique de Port-Royal’ et
les ‘Pensées’ de Pascal (Paris, 1975); Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature (Baltimore,
1993); Marc Shell, Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophic Economies
from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Baltimore, 1993).
transformations related to representation and symbolization and
truth production may have affected the practices of valuing prod-
ucts as well. Among other transformations, the emergence of the
copy on the art market in the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries could be addressed from this perspective. Copies were nearly
always cheaper than the original or the ‘authentic’ work of art, but
they offered the possibility to fill in gaps and complete a collec-
tion. While indexing the ‘original’, their value became nonethe-
less predicated on the collection (or the art market) as a whole.95
Examining the clothing sector in northern Italy, Barbara Bettoni
likewise noted a shift in which the ‘intrinsic quality of accessories’

made way for ‘quality as accessory’, wherein the value of items
such as buttons, buckles or ribbons was derived from their rela-
tionship to the garment as a whole.96
Consequently, it is perhaps not too far-fetched to compare
fashion and display to Foucault’s ‘taxonomy’ and the discourses
in catalogues and on trade cards to classical forms of ‘representa-
tion’. Adam Smith also connected the attraction and desirability
of specific goods to the relationship between those goods. Owing
to customs and habits influencing the consumer’s ability to
make reasonable judgements about what is beautiful, according
to Smith the attraction of goods depended (along with their
fashionability and their physical characteristics) on their ‘com-
plementarity’. Both intrinsic value and the manufacturing
artisans are entirely absent in this view, and the focus has shifted
instead to the relationship between products and to that between
a product and a discerning consumer.97
In this process, not only intrinsic value but the producers’
bodies (except for the machine-like elements) had also become
irrelevant. This becomes apparent when considering the
growing importance of retail and the concomitant display of
products, which must have affected the visibility of production.
95
For more on the changing relationship between collecting and the art market
(including additional references), see Adriana Turpin, ‘The Value of a Collection:
Where Did the Collector in Early Modern Europe Place Value?’, in De Munck and
Lyna (eds.), Concepts of Value (forthcoming).
96
Bettoni, ‘Usefulness, Ornament and Novelty’.
97
Berg and Clifford, ‘Introduction’, 9–10; Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral
Sentiments (1757), ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. McFie (Oxford, 1979), pt V, ch. 1.
See also Neil De Marchi, ‘Adam Smith’s Accommodation of ‘‘Altogether Endless’’
Desires’, and Maxine Berg, ‘New Commodities, Luxuries and their Consumers in
Eighteenth-Century England’, in Berg and Clifford (eds.), Consumers and Luxury.
After all, these developments were accompanied by increasing

levels of subcontracting and former masters working for whole-
salers and large entrepreneurs rather than for their own cus-
tomers.98 In all likelihood, the emergence of shop spaces in the
fronts of houses was thus accompanied by the relocation of pro-
duction to other spaces in the house (the rear, the cellar, the attic,
etc.).99 In the long run, labour may have disappeared from the
public sphere altogether, in both a literal and a symbolic sense.
Up to the seventeenth century, idealized representations of crafts
typically depicted labour as connected to the public sphere.
Prints, such as those of Jost Amman in sixteenth-century

Germany and those of the Luiken brothers in the Dutch
Republic, which represented trades and crafts, typically show
open doors and windows, from which part of the city can be
glimpsed, often as customers and passers-by peek inside.100
Although economic historians could again explain this by refer-
ring to the necessity for a transparent market and fraud prevention,
the presence of manual labour in the public sphere was part of a
public culture in which artisans, as well as rhetoricians and others,
engaged in the physical demonstration of their abilities in public
forums. For guild-based masters, such demonstrations included
the completion of a master test; for rhetoricians, the demonstra-
tion of eloquence (which was at least partly physical as well).101
98
See, for example, Harald Deceulaer, ‘Ready to Wear Clothing and
Subcontracting in Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Century Antwerp’, Textile
History, xxxi, 2 (2000); Lis and Soly, ‘Subcontracting in Guild-Based Export Trades’;
Giorgio Riello, ‘Strategies and Boundaries: Subcontracting and the London Trades in
the Long Eighteenth Century’, Enterprise and Society, ix, 2 (2008).
99
Bert De Munck and Reinoud Vermoesen, ‘Shops, Labour Relations and
Distribution Networks: The Emergence of Retail and the Disappearance of
Producer–Retailers in Alost, c.1650–c.1800’, paper presented to the Third Flemish-
Dutch Conference on the Economy and Society of the Low Countries before
1850, Antwerp, 31 Jan.–1 Feb. 2008; De Munck, ‘One Counter and Your Own
Account’, 41.
100
See Jost Amman and Hans Sachs, Das Ständebuch: Herrscher, Handwerker und
Künstler des ausgehenden Mittelalters. 114 Holzschnitte (1568; Cologne, 2006); Jan and
Kasper Luiken, Spiegel van het menselyk bedryf: vertoonende honderd verscheiden ambach-
ten konstig afgebeeld, en met godlyke spreuken en stichtelyke verzen verrykt (Amsterdam,
1694).
101
Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, ‘ ‘‘A wonderfull tryumfe, for the wynning of a pryse’’:
Guilds, Ritual, Theater, and the Urban Network in the Southern Low Countries, ca.
1450–1650’, Renaissance Quarterly, lix (2006); Arjan Van Dixhoorn, ‘Chambers of
Rhetoric: Performative Culture and Literary Sociability in the Early Modern
Northern Netherlands’, in Arjan Van Dixhoorn and Susie Speakman Sutch (eds.),
The Reach of the Republic of Letters: Literary and Learned Societies in Late Medieval and
(cont. on p. 71)
These demonstrations were also part of an ensemble of political
events (including marches and processions) in which the same
middle groups affirmed and claimed their active roles within the
public space.
In the long term, these processions and marches, along with the
presence of working bodies on the street side, diminished in im-
portance or became appropriated by absolute monarchs.102
Moreover, and more importantly for our purposes, they are
assumed to have been transformed since the Reformation from
practices in which the supernatural was made ‘present’ into prac-
tices that ‘communicated’ and ‘represented’ something.103 At the
same time, the connection between labour and the (urban) public

sphere disappeared from idealized images of arts and crafts.
Eighteenth-century images of artisanal labour, such as the
French pewterer Pierre-Augustin Salmon’s print collection
L’Art du potier d’étain104 and the French Encyclopédie, no longer
depict artisans in public, urban environments but instead present
them in enclosed spaces from which the outside world is not vis-
ible. Simultaneously, in these images the artisans’ bodies appear
less pronounced. Here, instruments come to the fore, and seem
far more important than bodies.105 The working bodies of the
artisans thus literally disappeared from the scene, as they did
subsequently from the history of material culture.
VII
CONCLUSION
The history of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transition
to industrial capitalism and consumerism, including the abolition
of the guilds, has been written from both a socio-economic and a
(n. 101 cont.)

Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2008); Bert De Munck and Arjan Van Dixhoorn, ‘The
Body in the Performance of Knowledge: The Mechanical and Liberal Arts in the Civic
Community, 1568–1713’, in Sven Dupré et al. (eds.), Embattled Territory: The
Circulation of Knowledge in the Spanish Netherlands (forthcoming).
102
See, for example, Peter Arnade, Realms of Ritual: Burgundian Ceremony and Civic
Life in Late Medieval Ghent (Ithaca, 1996). See, further, Élodie Lecuppre-Desjardin
(ed.), La Ville des cérémonies: essai sur la communication politique dans les anciens Pays-
Bas bourguignons (Turnhout, 2004).
103
Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe.
104
Pierre-Augustin Salmon, L’Art du potier d’étain (Paris, 1788).
105
See De Munck and Van Dixhoorn, ‘Body in the Performance of Knowledge’.
political perspective.106 Ideas inherited from the Enlightenment

have figured prominently in this, although they often risk being
reduced to strategies to legitimize deregulation and the increasing
power of central states.107 Labour historians, for their part, have
described processes of proletarianization and changing percep-
tions of labour, but they fall short of really tackling the processes
of alienation, at least in terms of the changing relations between
manufacturers and their products.
Theoretically, the so-called ‘material turn’ could be helpful
here, because it involves the fundamental relationship between
subject and object. But the ‘turn towards matter’ has often been
reduced to the emergence of a modern consumer, even if — or

perhaps because — nineteenth- and twentieth-century notions of
‘objectification’ and ‘commodity fetishism’ are applied. All too
frequently historians have assumed the existence of modern value
systems, in which the value of objects depends upon an external
system of meaning and a Cartesian subject which assigns mean-
ing visually and discursively from within a specific cultural frame
of reference. This (anachronistic) modern individual is, from the
Renaissance onwards, assumed to be separate from objects; as a
result, any true changes in subject–object relationships after the
sixteenth century are obscured.
In a sense, the history of material culture is thus written from
the perspective of the historical victors. What remains obscured is
the gradual commodification of products in the early modern
period and the way small commodity producers (whether or
not organized in guilds) dealt with this process. In my view,
early modern products made by guild-based artisans (in strong
guilds) were not entirely commodified. What masters signified
with their hallmarks was that the inherent quality of their prod-
ucts was guaranteed by the collective characteristics of a politic-
ally privileged fraternity. As such, intrinsic value cannot be
reduced to the price of raw materials or regarded as a kind of
use value. On the contrary, intrinsic value was fundamentally
106
A status quaestionis is presented in Heinz-Gerhard Haupt (ed.), Das Ende
der Zünfte: ein europäischer Vergleich (Göttingen, 2002).
107
See, for example, Josef Ehmer, ‘Zünfte in Österreich in der frühen Neuzeit’,
112–26, and Daniela Frigo, ‘Die italienischen Zünfte am Ende des Ancien Régimes:
Stand, Probleme und Perspektiven der Forchung’, 208–14, both in Haupt (ed.), Das
Ende der Zünfte; Steven L. Kaplan, La Fin des corporations (Paris, 2001); Corine Maitte,
‘Le Réformisme éclairé et les corporations: l’abolition des Arts en Toscane’, Revue
d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, xlix, 1 (2002).
linked to the guild-based masters’ political philosophy and their
place within the urban political fabric. Moreover, it involved very
specific subject–object relationships, in which the value of prod-
ucts (and hence the producers) derived from the religiously
inspired encounter between two morally charged bodies: the
body of the artisan and his raw materials.
Conceptually, these findings suggest that a Marxist perspective
is insufficient for a thorough understanding of what was at stake
for these early modern producers. This is why I propose to pro-
ceed from anthropological concepts developed by Marcel Mauss
and his followers. At least in those regions in which craft guilds
were truly in the hands of masters (as was the case in the Southern

Netherlands) rather than where they were instruments in the
hands of merchants (as in the Northern Netherlands) or of central
governments (as in France), manufactured products would still
seem to have possessed gift-like qualities. To the masters, their
own ‘spirits’ (understood as the masters’ moral qualities and pol-
itical status) were in an important sense still present in their prod-
ucts. Nor is a post-structuralist conceptual framework entirely up
to the task of explaining what was at stake for these guild-based
artisans. While Marxist analysis has been part of the process by
which the subject–object relationship has been reduced to a
purely socio-economic relationship, the post-structuralist per-
spective has itself been responsible for reducing objects to a
kind of text. If my suggestion holds that there was a connection
with epistemic shifts, then the problem for these masters was
precisely that intrinsic value was replaced as the basis for the
value of products by a relatively new epistemic system in which
the value of products emerged from an external symbolic order.
In the terminology of Bruno Latour, these developments could
be understood as purification processes in which objects (nature)
lost their agency, while subjects constructed the myth that
they were independent with regard to objects and materials.
Nevertheless, all this, of course, does not solve the historical
problem of the agency of objects and materiality once and for
all. It remains to be seen, for example, to what extent actor net-
work theory, in which the agency of objects emerges from the
contingent networks of humans and non-humans alike, can
really be applied to the early modern context. One fruitful way
forward could be to confront Latour’s ideas with the research, by
religious and cultural historians as well as by historians of science,
on the so-called ‘disenchantment of the world’. Although histor-

ians have in recent decades qualified the process and pointed to
important continuities, there remains a certain consensus that
there was a gradual retreat of the holy and the magical from the
natural world, demonstrated by the disappearance of sacramental
magic and the immanence of the holy in images and rituals.108
While the first half of the seventeenth century may have witnessed
an intensified obsession with supernatural phenomena, in the
longer run the supernatural appears to have been reduced to
the remote (rather than the immanent) hand of God as the pro-
verbial clockmaker.109
What is clear, at least, is that the privileged status of this cor-

porative middle class disappeared because of a fundamental shift
in the approach to value and meaning. Products gradually came
to derive their value from their place within a taxonomy of
products or from a value discourse in catalogues, trade cards
and other external media. Even the working body itself, as the
seat of knowledge, skill and reliability, seems to have disappeared
from view in this process. While the almost mystical bond
between intrinsic value and the status of guild-based masters in
the economic realm came under pressure, ‘modern’ consumers
and ‘modern’ natural philosophers and Enlightenment thinkers
gradually reduced materiality, including that of the human body,
to mere passive matter without agency.
University of Antwerp Bert De Munck
108
Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe. See also Keith Thomas, Religion and
the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971); Richard C. Trexler, ‘Florentine
Religious Experience: The Sacred Image’, Studies in the Renaissance, 19 (1972),
pp. 7–41.
109
For a more comprehensive view, see Walsham, ‘Reformation and the
Disenchantment of the World Reassessed’. For a perspective from the history of
science, see Daston, ‘Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern
Europe’.

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ARTISANS, PRODUCTS AND GIFTS:

RETHINKING THE HISTORY OF

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(internalization).4 In this vein, historians of material culture have

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broader network of people and objects. A network not only as-

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In the final two sections of this article, I shall therefore tenta-

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labour is transformed into a type of commodity. However, both

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trespassed upon the guilds’ terrain by developing production

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products. The hallmarks of the guild could in fact be considered

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community.45 This is exemplified in the guilds’ rituals and cere-

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diatribes against guild regulations, eighteenth-century adminis-

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was almost automatically incorporated into a guild, as was the

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using the label ‘commodity fetishism’.73 On the other hand, they

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matter.79 For Weiner, however, the standing of a group is less

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proclaiming the intrinsic value of the product, and within which

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From about the mid seventeenth century, according to Foucault,

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After all, these developments were accompanied by increasing

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(n. 101 cont.)

political perspective.106 Ideas inherited from the Enlightenment

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on the so-called ‘disenchantment of the world’. Although histor-

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University of Antwerp Bert De Munck

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