Learning by the Book: Manuals and Handbooks in the History of Knowledge

June 6-10, 2018 |  Princeton University

Conveners: Angela Creager (Princeton University), Mathias Grote (Humboldt University Berlin), Elaine Leong (MPI for the History of Science, Berlin), and Kerstin von der Krone (GHI Washington)

Supported by: German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C. and Princeton University (the Center for Collaborative History, the International Fund, and the David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Project in the Humanities Council).

Often overlooked, handbooks, protocols, and manuals are key tools in the making, preserving, and sharing of knowledge. Across editorial offices, artisanal workshops, religious schools, culinary institutes, and biomedical laboratories, instructional and reference texts codify the knowledge of a working community, with an eye to communicating what a new practitioner needs to know. This conference will address how handbooks, protocols, manuals, catalogues and related instructional or reference media have contributed to the standardization, codification, transmission, and revision of knowledge in diverse fields. How are practices and protocols written down, distributed or preserved, and how are objects or processes named, registered or classified? What kind of credit accompanies the development or compilation of methods or reference literature? When and why do certain books become commercially successful or canonical, and others obsolete? How does their circulation relate to the commodification of required materials, or to more informal forms of exchange?

We will explore these and much more questions during a conference, that will feature presentations from more than 30 speakers and discuss manuals and handbooks from antiquity to the present and in a broad geographical and topical scope.