The Boundaries of Knowledge: Books, Experts, and Readers in Early Modern Mines

This article explores a key question in the history of science: Could untrained officials learn and apply practical knowledge by reading how-to books and collaborating with expert practitioners? Notably, historians of science have studied workplaces such as the mines as arenas of knowledge exchange between workers, expert practitioners, and learned humanists. This article uses a labor history approach to explore what this exchange meant in practice. It analyzes the attempts of an untrained official in the mines of the Medici family to learn and reproduce practical knowledge about prospecting and surveying. By the mid-sixteenth century, this official read Georg Agricola’s (1494–1555) mining treatises and had access to the expertise of German miners from the renowned mining districts of Central Europe. The analysis of his reports based on the reading of the book, along with the hierarchical organization of labor established by the German experts in the Medici mines, reveals that the presence of craftsmen and scholarly works reinforced, rather than blurred, the boundaries of knowledge in early modern mines.