Drawn up by a learned physician from the mouths of artisans

Abstract

This article demonstrates how multi-layered and open-ended the genre of the manual could be. It focuses on the so-called Mayerne manuscript, a seventeenth-century source text, comprising more than 300 recipes and ‘how-to’ instructions. Many of the entries are dated and include geographical and professional information that identify artisans and master painters as sources of detailed descriptions of materials and techniques. The article deconstructs an interpretation of Theodore de Mayerne’s recipe compilation as a handbook intended for practical use, and instead shows that many voices lay behind Mayerne’s extensive documentation of artisanal know how. The article argues that the manuscript was perhaps never intended for publication, but that it provides an exceptional testimony to the practice of an early modern ethnographer of artisanal working methods. A closer look at Mayerne’s practice of note taking as a physician suggests that it functioned as a working tool to document technical and artisanal knowledge of materials.