Reworking Recipes : Reading and Writing Practical Texts in the Early Modern Arts

Abstract

In this dissertation, I study the use of instructive texts in the arts and crafts between 1500-1750. Practical knowledge had been written down since antiquity, but specifically from the fifteenth century onwards interest in these sorts of texts started to grow. More and more craftsmen and artisans started to write, and their recipe collections and manuals were in great demand. But with the spread of practical texts, awareness of the potential problems connected to the written communication of practical knowledge arose. Reading a book is not necessarily the best way to learn a craft. To understand how writers and readers dealt with these problems, I study how texts and practices were entangled. To this end, I combine traditional historical methods with performance of the historical instructions themselves. I make reconstructions of seventeenth-century glass recipes and re-enact an historical apprenticeship based on an eighteenth-century manual for young gold- and silversmiths. In doing so, I identify the writing strategies that writers employed and learn how readers were using practical texts. I argue that seventeenth-century writers were actively seeking innovative textual formats that enabled them to best describe the complexity of their making practices. They regularly adapted academic formats for that purpose, such as commentaries and experimental essays. I also demonstrate that readers needed certain resources and prior knowledge to execute written instructions. A practical text did not guarantee a successful outcome, but required trial-and-error, improvisation and persistence from readers, who needed to actively adapt the texts to their own practices.