2020 Essays

An Introduction to Ms. Fr. 640 and its Author-Practitioner

Smith, Pamela H.

This critical edition of the late sixteenth-century anonymous manuscript cataloged as Ms. Fr. 640 in the Bibliothèque nationale de France was created through the work of team members, students, and collaborators of the Making and Knowing Project at Columbia University. The technical and artistic “recipes” contained in Ms. Fr. 640 provide an outstanding opportunity to explore the epistemic and historical intersections between craft making and scientific knowing, especially in light of the emergence of a new science in the following centuries. Ms. Fr. 640 provides important insights into the material, technical, and intellectual worlds of late sixteenth-century Europe, and brings a better understanding of how and why nature was investigated, used in art, and collected and appreciated in early modern Europe. It sheds light, as well, on the type of knowledge possessed by handworkers, known today as “practical knowledge,” “how-to,” or “makers’ knowledge.” At the heart of the Edition of Ms. Fr. 640, however, lies an intriguing puzzle: who was the anonymous individual who wrote down (and in many cases tried out) these 930 entries filling 170 folios, and why did a French nobleman collect and preserve this manuscript?