A Artisanal Knowledge and Craftsmanship Bert De Munck Centre for Urban History/Urban Studies Institute, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium Keywords Apprenticeship · Artisanal epistemology · Arts · Citizenship · Creativity · Episteme · Guilds · Ingenuity · Innovation · Invention · Labor · Liberal arts · Mechanical arts · Political subjectivity · Rhetoric · Science · Senses · Skills · Techne · Technology Introduction: The Politics of Artisanal Knowledge A clear definition of artisanal knowledge is diffi- cult to present, as it is a contested field during the early modern period. Today artisanal knowledge is often referred to with the term “craft,” but as Glenn Adamson (2013) has rightfully argued, this originates in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, when craftsmanship was considered the “other” of “modernity,” Following Adamson (2013: xiii), craft emerged as “a coherent idea” and as a “defined terrain” only in opposition to industrialization: “Craft was not a static backdrop against which industry emerged (...), the two were created alongside one another, each defined against the other through constant juxtaposition.” Consequently, the concept of craft and craftsman- ship cannot be used as an analytic lens to look at the preindustrial period unproblematically. The challenge is rather to understand the conceptuali- zation of craftsmanship, or artisanal knowledge, prior to the mid-eighteenth century. Although the enduring importance of hands-on skills has been pointed at for the nineteenth cen- tury as well, artisans faced increasing mechaniza- tion and technological innovation, resulting in division of labor and deskilling for a least part of the labor force (Samuel 1977, 1992; Berg 1980; Sabel and Zeitlin 1985). In contrast to this, we 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 labor, the sophistication of the skills involved, and the autonomy of the artist. This would still be reductive however. Among nineteenth-century conservative intellectuals, artisanal knowledge was surrounded by nostalgia for the late medieval period because the labor of artisans would have been embedded in a deeply religious and ordered society in which artisanal skills and knowledge were not disconnected from the artisans’ piety and virtue. While such nostalgic views culminated in the famous Arts and Crafts movement in the late nineteenth and early nineteenth century, they cast their shadow into the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, where they, for instance, tran- spire in the work of Richard Sennett (2008), who 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