Youthful minds and hands: Learning practical knowledge in early modern Europe

Abstract

In Cesare Ripa's famous and often translated anthology of personifications, Studio (to learn) is described as a young man (un Giouane) in the original Italian edition (see fig. 1, above). In this image from the eighteenth-century English edition, the learning of youths is represented as an activity characterized by solitude: reading a book on one's own. The cock on the left functions as a symbol for the diligence of such isolated young learners (Ripa 1603; Ripa 1709; Ripa 1971). Ripa's personification represents youthful learning as quite the opposite of the collective production of knowledge in the laboratory, and the technologies of learning in the workshop or on the shop floor. In the early modern period, the "studio" referred to a place for reading and drawing surrounded by books, spatially removed from the workshop or "laboratory" in which manual work was performed (Dupré 2014).Yet, recent scholarship has shown that practical knowledgecollectively obtained in workshops or laboratoriesbecame increasingly characteristic of the dominant knowledge cultures