Abstract
This essay explores a number of structuring frameworks for the practical knowledge of mining and metalworking, including the place and economic structures of material production in mining, the entanglement of the human body with matter in the landscape, and the constraining and affording properties of the materials themselves. Larger belief and knowledge systems, such as understandings about the relationship of earth and the heavens, as well as analogies to the human body and its processes, also structured practices and practical knowledge. Objects, too, could structure and reinforce practical knowledge systems.
The essay then turns to case studies that demonstrate the structures of practical knowledge formed by a vernacular knowledge system emerging from the complex of activities and practices that made up mining. This knowledge system was shaped by the methods of prospecting for ores, as well as by strong interest in a theory of the genesis of metals on the part of civic, territorial, and economic stakeholders. The essay ends by examining the codification of these vernacular “theories” in the books of scholars, where they found their way into the growing discourse of experimental philosophy (an increasingly powerful structuring framework over the course of the early modern period), and from there into modern science.
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Smith, P.H. (2017). The Codification of Vernacular Theories of Metallic Generation in Sixteenth-Century European Mining and Metalworking. In: Valleriani, M. (eds) The Structures of Practical Knowledge. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45671-3_14
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