A

Artisanal Knowledge and against the other through constant juxtaposition.”

Craftsmanship Consequently, the concept of craft and craftsman-
ship cannot be used as an analytic lens to look at
Bert De Munck the preindustrial period unproblematically. The
Centre for Urban History/Urban Studies Institute, challenge is rather to understand the conceptuali-
University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium zation of craftsmanship, or artisanal knowledge,
prior to the mid-eighteenth century.
Keywords Although the enduring importance of hands-on
skills has been pointed at for the nineteenth cen-
Apprenticeship · Artisanal epistemology ·
tury as well, artisans faced increasing mechaniza-
Arts · Citizenship · Creativity · Episteme ·
tion and technological innovation, resulting in
Guilds · Ingenuity · Innovation · Invention ·
division of labor and deskilling for a least part of
Labor · Liberal arts · Mechanical arts · Political
the labor force (Samuel 1977, 1992; Berg 1980;
subjectivity · Rhetoric · Science · Senses ·
Sabel and Zeitlin 1985). In contrast to this, we
Skills · Techne · Technology
might be tempted to see late medieval and early
modern artisanal knowledge as something akin to
art, stressing the lack of alienation and division of
Introduction: The Politics of Artisanal
labor, the sophistication of the skills involved, and
Knowledge
the autonomy of the artist. This would still be
reductive however. Among nineteenth-century
A clear definition of artisanal knowledge is diffi-
conservative intellectuals, artisanal knowledge
cult to present, as it is a contested field during the
was surrounded by nostalgia for the late medieval
early modern period. Today artisanal knowledge
period because the labor of artisans would have
is often referred to with the term “craft,” but as
been embedded in a deeply religious and ordered
Glenn Adamson (2013) has rightfully argued, this
society in which artisanal skills and knowledge
originates in the late eighteenth and nineteenth
were not disconnected from the artisans’ piety and
century, when craftsmanship was considered the
virtue. While such nostalgic views culminated in
“other” of “modernity,” Following Adamson
the famous Arts and Crafts movement in the late
(2013: xiii), craft emerged as “a coherent idea”
nineteenth and early nineteenth century, they cast
and as a “defined terrain” only in opposition to
their shadow into the late twentieth and early
industrialization: “Craft was not a static backdrop
twenty-first century, where they, for instance, tran-
against which industry emerged (. . .), the two
spire in the work of Richard Sennett (2008), who
were created alongside one another, each defined
not only refers to craft knowledge as “an
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
D. Jalobeanu, C. T. Wolfe (eds.), Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20791-9_237-1
2 Artisanal Knowledge and Craftsmanship
enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a
job well for its own sake” (2008: 9), but also
conceptualizes it as a remedy for the present-day
alienation of workers and consumers (Sennett
2008, 2012). To a degree, this can be seen as
part of the same nostalgic conception of early
modern craftsmanship, but we should not reduce
this to an outdated conservative reflex entirely.
The fact that in the nineteenth as well as in the
twentieth century the “pre-modern” period is seen
as one in which craftsmanship was not discon-
nected from the broader political and social con-
text is justified to an extent. As will be argued
below, craft and artisanal skills were indeed fun-
damentally entangled with the political and social
structures and systems of meaning in the late
medieval and early modern period. The challenge
is to understand how the relationship between
skills and the broader historical context trans-
formed in the long run.
Late Medieval and early modern artisans them-
selves did also refer to their skills and knowledge
with craft or similar terms, but this was not
opposed at the time to something akin to moder-
nity. The terminology was rather tributary to
knowledge systems borrowed from Antiquity, in
which technê was opposed to epistêmê and
“mechanical arts” to “liberal arts.” The latter
opposition, in particular, seems to have marked
contemporary views on artisanal knowledge, with
artisans being confined to the mechanical arts. As
Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly (2012: 363–364)
have pointed out, ambitious and self-conscious
artisans typically felt the need to connect their
skills and knowledge to the terminology of intel-
lectuals and scientists, accommodating notions
referring to the artes liberales – e.g., when using
the term artes (or something like conste or kynste
in German languages) in order to bridge the two
worlds. This betrays a certain hierarchy in which
intellectual knowledge was seen as superior to
hands-on knowledge, but which should not be
taken for granted. In the first half of the nineteenth
century, revolutionary artisans partly based their
political claims on the value of their hands-on
skills. Following William Sewell’s pioneering
book Work and Revolution in France (1980), arti-
sanal work was a key element in the collective
identity of the revolutionaries. Not only did they
define themselves in opposition to “aristocrats”
and other “idles” who did not work with their
hands, they also conceived labor as “the source
of popular sovereignty” and “the foundation of
political order” (Sewell 1980: 263, 265). Theirs
was an attempt, in other words, to have their
knowledge and skills recognized as the very
ground of their political claims.
As will become clear below, the
revolutionary’s struggle to have their labor and
skills recognized as a source of political legiti-
macy can be seen as the result of a long-term
development during the early modern period in
which they have gradually lost such legitimacy. In
the late medieval period too, artisans had strug-
gled for political recognition and then as well they
had invoked their labor and skills as a source of
political rights. In this period (culminating in the
Renaissance), artisanal skills and knowledge grew
more important in quantitative and economic as
well as in qualitative terms. In the context of the
so-called commercial revolution and a first (new)
wave of urbanization in Europe during roughly
the eleventh to the thirteenth century, artisanal
production emerged as the backbone of urban
economies. While textiles dominated quantita-
tively, artisanal production also included metal
work, leather and wood production, glass, and
earthenware, each of the broad sectors being sub-
divided in up to dozens of specialized crafts like
tapestry weaving and embroidery, gold and silver
smithing, ebony work, and the inlaying of wood,
Venetian glass, and ceramics, to name only a few.
During the Renaissance period, specialization as
well as technological innovation continued to
increase, as a result of which the importance of
“human capital” increased as an economic factor
(Van Der Wee 1988; van Zanden 2009). The
increasing importance of artisans in this period
resulted in the increasing political clout of arti-
sanal middling groups, as is clear from the history
of the urban revolts between the thirteenth and the
sixteenth century, in which artisans played an
important role and which can at least partly be
considered movements of civic emancipation
from the part of artisans (Najemy 1979; Schulz
1992; Boone and Prak 1995; Boone 2010). (See
Artisanal Knowledge and Craftsmanship
▶ “Apprenticeship, Guilds, and Craft Knowl-
edge”) Thanks to these revolts, artisans often
enjoyed a great deal of political clout and were
often recognized as political actors – if sometimes
only for short periods, as was the case in important
Italian city-states. At least the artisans themselves
grounded their political subjectivity in their eco-
nomic activities and identity.
In short, similar to the nineteenth century, late
medieval and Renaissance artisans connected
their political claims and rights to their value as
economic actors in general and their technical
knowledge and skills in specific. As we will see
below, this became increasingly difficult in the
early modern period, as the status of artisanal
skills drastically declined (or at least trans-
formed). Still, the long-term evolution cannot be
reduced to shifting balances of power. In the last
section of this entry, it will be shown that the
history of artisanal skills is not only profoundly
political, but also profoundly epistemological.
While the urban revolts often resulted in the polit-
ical recognition of occupational guilds, historians
have often reduced the subsequent loss of political
clout of artisans over the sixteenth to eighteenth
centuries to either processes of proletarianization,
due to economic transformations (specialization,
division of labor and increasing scale), or to polit-
ical transformations (state formation and bureau-
cratization), which discredited the artisans’
guilds. Under the influence of the so-called cul-
tural turn and with the help of art historians and
historians of science, new views have emerged in
which these economic and political transforma-
tions are entangled with religious, cultural, and
epistemological ones. But let us first turn to the
practices of acquiring artisanal knowledge, before
delving deeper into the cultural, intellectual, and
epistemological context.
The Practices of Artisanal Knowledge
Artisanal skills were acquired on the shop floor in
a process of learning by doing supervised by a
master artisan (for the institutional and juridical
context, see again the section on “Apprenticeship,
Guilds, and Craft Knowledge”). Vocational
3
schools did not emerge before the nineteenth cen-
tury, and even technical schools for engineering
were mostly established only from the eighteenth
century onward (De Munck and Soly 2007). Dur-
ing the Renaissance period, even engineers and
merchants mostly learned by doing and on the
spot. The education of the latter groups of course
differed from the training of artisans. As to the
former, it often involved mathematics (geometry),
however practical this was at the time (Cormack
et al. 2017). The education of merchants could
moreover involve handbooks (ars mercatoria)
and imply learning foreign languages and some-
what more advanced arithmetic acquired at
so-called small schools (Jeannin 1972; Hoock
and Jeannin 1991–1993; Angiolini and Roche
1995), but they too were ultimately learned by
doing, e.g., by being sent abroad to a branch of
the family firm. For artisans, learning by doing
and on the spot was entirely self-evident. Orphan-
ages could offer school-like circumstances in
which learning a craft took place within the
walls of a noneconomic institution (Safley 1997,
Chaps. 7 and 8; Safley 2005: 264, 277–278;
Crowston 2005; De Munck and Soly 2007: 7–8),
but the ateliers within these institutions were nev-
ertheless aiming at a certain economic return and,
hence, very much resembled a regular atelier. Nor
were manuals and guide books of great impor-
tance. Although in a limited number of trades
like painting, medicine, and textile dying recipes
must have played a role on the shop floor (Eamon
1996; Bucklow 2009; Leong and Rankin 2011),
the acquisition of skills was predominantly
embedded in an oral culture in which a master
passed on his knowledge by face-to-face demon-
stration and instruction. Like technical schools,
manuals emerged at the end of the early modern
period, but only to a limited extent and in a limited
number of trades like gold and silver smithing and
carpentry. And even then, the question remains to
what extent these trades could really be learned
with the help of these books.
The predominance of learning on the shop
floor moreover implied that artisanal skills were
firmly embedded in an artisanal culture in which
the acquisition of skills and knowledge was
connected to upbringing and socialization. The
4 Artisanal Knowledge and Craftsmanship
master did not only pass on his skills but his norms
and values too. This was all the more the case as
the majority of the apprentices boarded with the
master in question, with the latter acting “in loco
parentis,” as a substitute father of sorts (Smith
1981; Rappaport 1989: 232–238; Prak 2004; De
Munck 2010b). The master was supposed to
guard and discipline his pupil both on the shop
floor and beyond. He had to make sure that the
apprentice did not give way to bad boy’s tricks
like gambling and that he was home at night. Also,
the master was expected to ensure that the youth
fulfilled his religious duties, like going to church
on Sundays and Holy days (Kaplan 1993;
Pellegrin 1993, 1994; Lane 1996). To a degree,
the master artisan may even have been responsible
for the instruction of general skills like reading,
writing, and basic arithmetic and to send the
apprentice to primary school, but these skills
were mostly acquired already before a youth
started an apprenticeship with a master (Reith
1989: 4–5; Crowston 2007). The apprenticeship
mostly took place between – roughly – the age of
14 and 24, depending on the trade, region, and
period. While the average year of enrollment was
mostly around 15, the apprenticeship term typi-
cally ranged between 2 and 6 or 7 years, again
depending on the trade, region, and period
(Rappaport 1989: 296–297; Reith 1989: 4–5;
Kaplan 1993; De Munck 2007: 177–178).
In line with this, historians have often assumed
that apprenticeship was very much tied to a certain
life cycle ideal. Finishing an apprenticeship was
not only the completion of a training but becom-
ing mature as well. In the urban context, where
apprenticeship mostly took place in a guild con-
text, the finishing of an apprenticeship was mostly
the condition for becoming a master. According to
the guilds’ rules (see “Apprenticeship, guilds, and
craft knowledge”), the completion of an appren-
ticeship term was required not so much for the
right to work with a master, but above all for
becoming a master oneself (De Munck 2010c).
Some guilds moreover connected mastership to
marriage, among other things, enacting that one
had to be married in order to become a master
(Crossick 1997: 7–9; Wiesner 1986: 163–164;
Farr 2000: 245; Kluge 2009: 229). In short,
while apprenticeship was a route toward both
maturity and guild membership, guild structures
were seen as fundamentally entangled with family
structures and life cycle concerns (Ehmer 1984:
196). This is all the more noteworthy as master-
ship was mostly connected to citizenship. In most
European cities, becoming a master (“freeman”)
was mostly conditional upon becoming a burgher
to the city – or sometimes vice versa – so that
apprenticeship really gave access to political
rights and a political status (Prak 2018, Chap. 3).
This is what resulted from the late medieval urban
revolts, in which artisans had fought for political
as well as economic rights.
The overlap between upbringing and the acqui-
sition of skills thus suggests that there was a
connection between artisanal knowledge and a
civic culture leavened by notions of virtue and –
given the deeply religious context – piety. Both
contemporary intellectuals and the artisans them-
selves connected their labor and skills to a broader
civic culture in which such notions as friendship,
community, and mutual aid (or caritas) took center
stage (Farr 1988, 2000, Chaps. 1 and 6; Black
2009). As argued by Jan Dumolyn in his research
on late medieval Flanders, the artisans particularly
connected their work to honesty (Dumolyn 2014,
2017; De Munck 2018: 52). This is important
because the notion of honesty bridges the cultural
and the economic domain. With the help of their
guilds, the artisans in fact justified their politically
and economically privileged position not with the
superiority of their skills but rather with the idea
that they were trustworthy. What they guaranteed
to both policy makers and customers was not that
the products were made in a technologically supe-
rior way, but rather qualities invisible to the naked
eye – typically the nature and quality of the raw
material used. This is often what their hallmarks
(collective quality marks) guaranteed to their cus-
tomers (De Munck 2008, 2012; Kluge 2009:
292–298; Bettoni 2016).
All this should of course not be idealized – if
only because the artisans’ customs and strategies
were increasingly under pressure in the early
modern period. This is most visible in the fact
that at least in a range of trades like construction
and textiles, workshop size increased, which in
Artisanal Knowledge and Craftsmanship
turn changed the relationship between master and
apprentice. While in the late medieval period, the
number of apprentices per master was typically
limited to one per master (in addition to a few
journeymen) concentration trends rose in the six-
teenth to eighteenth centuries (Grießinger and
Reith 1986; Snell 1985: 228–269; Kaplan 1993).
Related to that, the ratio of apprentices boarding
with their master tended to decline, including in
sectors in which concentration trends were not
discernable, which suggests that the relationship
between master and apprentice transformed apart
from the emergence of “proto-capitalistic” manu-
factories (De Munck 2010b). The so-called ganze
Haus model in which apprentices became part of
the master’s household tended to disappear
(Hanne 1997: 686; Reith 2007; also von
Heusinger 2016). Part of the reason for this
might have to be sought for in the increasing
importance of the private family and the decline
of the guilds’ authority – which in theory must
have both undermined the authority of the master
beyond the work floor and his capacity to act as a
surrogate father. From an economic perspective, it
in any case resulted in a growing importance of
the family in firms, in terms of both capital and
labor allocation (Ehmer 1984: 202–203; also
Cerutti 1990).
In the long run, a wedge appears to have been
driven between upbringing and the acquisition of
skills. Research on juridical conflicts between
masters and apprentices has not only revealed
that the relationship was often rife with mutual
distrust and abuse (e.g., Griffiths 1996; Lane
1996), but also that apprentices by the seventeenth
century sometimes refused to perform household
chores and stressed that they were at the shop floor
to acquire skills and knowledge instead of
performing dull and repetitive work with which
they did not learn (De Munck 2010b). Telling
from research on the form and use of notarial
apprenticeship contracts in the seventeenth and
eighteenth century, such contracts were not instru-
ments in the hands of masters to discipline their
apprentices (cf. Kaplan 1993; Pellegrin 1993), but
should rather be seen as flexible juridical tools
shaped by two parties agreeing on the price
(including the amount of cheap labor to be
5
provided by the apprentice while learning) of a
specific range of knowledge to be acquired (and
the time necessary for that) (De Munck 2007,
Chap. 1; De Munck and De Kerf 2018). In other
words, artisanal skills would seem to have been
gradually commodified. While earlier research on
the “crisis of apprenticeship” in the eighteenth
century has suggested that this was due to increas-
ing scale and division of labor, recent research has
shown that commodification did not necessarily
result in deskilling (cf. Farr 2000, Chap. 8). In art
and luxury production, larger ateliers could just as
well offer more advanced skills to be acquired
with extremely expensive contracts. The gold
and silver smiths in seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century Antwerp, for instance, witnessed the
emergence of genuine “learning ateliers,” in
which apprentices could acquire basic transfer-
able skills next to more specialized and advanced
skills (De Munck and De Kerf 2018).
With respect to the perception and representa-
tion of artisanal skills, all this suggest that it would
be misguided to simply speak of the value of
artisanal skills increasing or decreasing. What
has become clear in recent research is that the
relationship between artisanal skills and the
broader (often urban) social and political context
transformed. A proper understanding thereof
requires to delve deeper in the cultural, religious,
and epistemological context.
The Epistemology of Artisanal
Knowledge
The meaning and perception of skills did not only
transform due to economic and technological
transformations. Under the influence of symbolic
anthropology and post-structuralism historians
have, from the 1970s and 1980s onward, started
to examine changing discourses related to skills
and labor and to take into account the impact of
changing symbolic systems of meaning. Social
historians have, for instance, pointed to the impor-
tance of ideas associated with the Enlightenment
in the process of discrediting guilds (e.g., Maitte
2002; also Farr 2000, Chap. 8; Kaplan 2001;
Haupt 2002), with William Sewell (1980: 22–25,
6 Artisanal Knowledge and Craftsmanship
70–71), arguing that the new worldview was
incompatible with the existence of corporations.
While the existence of guilds was consistent,
according to Sewell, with a worldview in which
the ordered realm of the spirit was distinguished
from the disordered realm of matter (with the soul
of the artisan being the connection between the
two), the post-enlightenment view was rather one
in which this dichotomy had disappeared and in
which artisans were connected to one unified
realm of disenchanted matter with their senses.
Sewell was actually way ahead of his time when
he wrote this in 1980, and it is still not entirely
clear how exactly trade secrets and guilds would
have become obsolete because of a changing
worldview; but with the help of recent work of
art historians and historians of science (working in
a Foucauldian tradition), the contours of the epis-
temological dimension have started to become
clear in the last two decades.
The challenge which recent research faces is to
overcome anachronistic and teleological views.
Like any other field, the history of knowledge
and skills is marked by the present-day context
in which historians work. But perhaps this is even
more difficult to escape in this field, because the
work of the intellectuals concerned with it is itself
based on the very distinctions which are at stake.
The most important of these distinctions is the
so-called hand–mind dichotomy, which nowa-
days implies that not only knowledge but also
creativity and the capacity to invent are seen as
capacities of the mind, while handwork is reduced
to making. It is of course acknowledged that mak-
ing can be very sophisticated and be based on
lengthy training, but making is nevertheless per-
ceived today as inferior to intellectual knowledge
and also to the knowledge of artists, who are
attributed the capacity to understand things and
to design and invent new things. The task of
present-day historians is to reveal where such
dichotomies and hierarchies come from, but this
has proven to be difficult. This can be illustrated
with the work of the most influential historian of
technology today, viz. Joel Mokyr. Mokyr (2002)
has introduced a conceptual distinction between
prescriptive and propositional knowledge to
understand the emergence of the so-called
knowledge economy from the eighteenth century
on – which in his view is based on the increasing
interaction between these two types of knowl-
edge. But these two types very much reflect the
present-day dichotomy and hierarchy and are
therefore not very helpful for understanding
where they come from. Prescriptive knowledge
is by and large the knowledge of artisans, which
he reduces to knowing how to do things without
understanding why something works or not (why
the material reacts in such or such a way etc.)
while propositional knowledge in his definition
amounts to understanding the underlying
natural laws.
Current scholarship on craftsmanship takes
issue with the distinction between hand and
mind and the related idea that hands-on knowl-
edge is mostly perceived as inferior to the cerebral
and cognitive knowledge of what Richard Florida
has called the “creative class” (Adamson 2007,
2013; Dear et al. 2007; Florida 2002, 2004). Fol-
lowing the definition of Florida, artisans are diffi-
cult to include in the creative class. While this
class consists of highly educated “knowledge
workers” with the capacity to invent new products
and production processes, the source of their cre-
ativity needed for this is by and large situated in
their heads. Almost automatically, artisans are,
thus, perceived as inferior. Historians of science
and art historians have however argued that up to
the Renaissance, artisans were not by necessity
inferior to artists and scientists when it comes to
knowing or creativity. They have even argued that
the rise of the “new science” based on observation
and experiment in the seventeenth century – i.e.,
the very fundament of modern science – was at
least partly a bottom up process in which artisans
played a major part (Long 2011; Cormack 2017).
After all, observation and experiment was what
artisans were good at – as was also observed by
René Descartes, who lauded the artisanal faculty
of perspicacity and discernment, which he consid-
ered helpful for understanding the order
(mathesis) of nature because it enabled to detect
differences and similarities in things (Gauvin
2006: 190; also Dupré and Göttler 2017). In line
with this, historian of science Pamela Smith
2000a, b, 2004) has used the term “artisanal
Artisanal Knowledge and Craftsmanship
epistemology” to refer to the knowledge system of
artisans and artists alike.
While it is difficult to define such an episte-
mology, a tip of the veil is lifted in the dialogue of
Idiota de mente (1937: 51) of Nicolaus Cusanus,
in which a wooden spoon maker argues that his
“art” is superior because, like God and in contrast
to the painters and sculptors, he doesn’t need a
model to create: “my art produces rather than
reproduces natural forms and is, therefore, more
like infinite art.” At least for a number of mystic
humanists “untutored minds” had a more direct,
unmediated access to God’s wisdom and truth, as
their way of creating resembled god’s way of
creating. According to historian of science Pamela
Long (2011), this was increasingly the case in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the arti-
sans’ knowledge about mechanical and chemical
processes were on the rise. Artisans could be seen
as a type of “knowledge workers” as a result
(De Munck 2019). The artisans’ notion of inven-
tion as invoked by Cusanus was close to imitation
as well as similar to the knowledge of Renaissance
rhetoricians, for whom finding the right words
was also a way of approaching god’s wisdom
and truth (Ong 1958; Miner 2004, Chaps. 1 and
2; Oosterhoff 2014: 301). Such views are reminis-
cent of Michel Foucault’s definition of the
so-called Renaissance episteme, in which both
words and things gave access to truth through
the principles of resemblance and similitude
(Foucault 1966, esp. Chap. 2). Following Fou-
cault, this is related to the dominant religious
worldview in which God was immanent and in
which God has in a way left his signature in matter
during creation.
The subsequent disparagement of artisanal
knowledge started roughly in the sixteenth cen-
tury. The transformation has been referred to, by
Hélène Vérin and others, as “a reduction of art”
(réduction en art), a process in which the tacit
routines and the embodied knowledge of artisans
was increasingly replaced with the systems and
abstract codes of engineers and architects (Vérin
1998, 2002; Dubourg Glatigny and Vérin 2008).
This was not simply a straightjacket imposed from
above, but partly emerged from transformations in
large enterprises and manufacturing and in
7
practical activities like mining and ship building
(Valleriani 2017). Nor was it disconnected from
epistemological transformations. Among other
things, it was related to transformations in the
conception of “invention.” As intellectual histo-
rians and historians of science have argued, a
more instrumental view on invention emerged
by the early seventeenth century. In the scientific
context, invention turned into an instrument to
distinguish truth from rhetoric with the help of
experimentation and the demonstration of proof
(Ong 1958; Atkinson 2007, Chap. 2; Oosterhoff
2014: 301). In the economic context, invention in
the meantime would seem to have shifted from
imitation to innovation and, hence, would have
started to resemble the modern notion of the cre-
ation of something new.
In concrete terms, the transformations resulted
in the status of artisanal knowledge and skills
losing ground against the growing prestige of
art. This is at least suggested by the fact that artists
such as painters, sculptors, and architects started
to distinguish themselves from what they referred
to as “mere mechanics.” In some instances, artists
like stone sculptors no longer wanted to be part of
the same guild as the masons, as they were used
to, and they aligned themselves to a learned cul-
ture of people who knew Latin and were
acquainted with the texts and models of the
ancients to make the distinction clear (De Munck
2010a; Lis and Soly 2012: 365–400). In one spe-
cific juridical procedure, the sculptors argued that
their skills (which they called “conste” or art) did
not only take longer to learn but, in contrast to the
masons’ skills, required talent. The sculptors
argued that masonry could be learned by virtually
everybody, while it took years to even find out
whether a youth was talented enough to become a
sculptor (Filipczak 1987: 11–19; De Munck
2010a: 342–348). The emergence of such a dis-
tinction explains the emergence of art academies
in which painters, sculptors, and architects learned
to draw along with the acquisition of more theo-
retical notions of geometry, perspective, and
architecture (see also Shiner 2003). Art academies
and drawing schools proliferated in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, providing one of
the first alternatives to learning on the shop floor
8 Artisanal Knowledge and Craftsmanship
for artisanal middling groups. Not only artists but
artisans as well increasingly frequented these
school, presumably because drawing became a
coveted skill in an increasing number of trades.
The latter process may in turn be attributable in
part to the fact that fashion and design became
more important in the evaluation of a product – at
the expense of the (resale) value of the raw mate-
rial used, which was guaranteed by the artisan’s
honesty and status (and through their guilds) (e.g.,
Richards 1998; De Munck 2007: 250–258, 2010a,
342–348).
Related to that, the distinction between prac-
tice and theory was rearticulated too, as can be
shown by changes in the medical sector. While
this sector was in the Middle Ages characterized
by a strict division between university trained
doctors and surgeons who trained on the shop
floor, this distinction gradually blurred – again
from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
on. Learned scholars started to complement their
book-based knowledge with knowledge reaped
from experiments – as is exemplified with the
emergence of anatomical lessons and research.
Conversely, artisans like surgeons and pharma-
cists aspired to be part of the learned culture, by
learning Latin and frequent schools (Porter 1983,
1987; Lindemann 1999). Nevertheless, conflicts
at the occasion of the establishment of medical
colleges from the seventeenth century onward
reveal that artisans increasingly faced the domi-
nance of theory. The colleges obligated artisans to
attend theoretical lessons and pass theoretical
exams, provoking opposition among surgeons
and pharmacists who argued that knowledge
acquired through apprenticeship was superior to
knowledge learned in books. The other side of the
coin was that some artisans started to refer to their
knowledge with terms akin to scientia, again in an
attempt to be part of the learned culture
(De Munck 2010a: 348–353).
Yet by the eighteenth century, artisans were
mostly seen as devoid of ingenuity (De Munck
2014, 2019), for instance, by the Scottish philos-
opher Adam Smith who clearly distinguished
between the “art” and “ingenuity” needed to
invent new machinery and products, on one
hand, and the more limited capacity of people
which subsequently had to make these products
and whose activities he referred to with the term
“common trades,” on the other (Smith 1778:
Book I, 151–153 and Book II, p. 217). Even in
what one could call genuine eulogies of the
mechanical arts like the famous Encyclopédie of
Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond D’Alembert, arti-
sans were actually reduced to “automatons,” i.e.,
sophisticated robots devoid of talent and ingenu-
ity (cf. Koepp 1986, 2009; Sewell 1986; Schaffer
1999; Lis and Soly 2012: 422, 485–488; De
Munck 2014: 55–61). This paradox can be
explained by the fact that artisanal skills now
acquired their value in a completely different gov-
ernmental context, one in which artisanal knowl-
edge and skills did no longer provide access to the
urban body politic as a political subject, but were
reduced to a factor in a broader logic of production
(De Munck 2019). From the perspective of the
history of science, the paradox is that the “arti-
sanal bodily experience was absorbed into the
work of the natural philosopher at the same time
that the artisan himself was excised from it”
(Smith 2004: 186).
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