2020 Essays

Experience Will Teach You: Recording, Testing, Knowing, and the Language of Experience in Ms. Fr. 640

Taape, Tillmann

This essay explores the language of experience in Ms. Fr. 640 to characterize the place of experiential knowledge in the author-practitioner’s epistemology. Based on a concordance search of the terms experience, experimenter, essayer, esprouver, and cognoistre, the essay highlights the author-practitioner’s often overlapping use of these words and how they map onto the modes of writing down experience that can be identified in the manuscript: inferences from repeated experience, accounts of singular events, specific material tests, and invitations to further testing.