2020 Essays

Methodologies for Making and Knowing: Reconstructions for Historical Research

Klein, Joel A.

This essay summarizes some recent historiography that has featured historical reconstructions, and discusses the Making and Knowing Project’s particular methodologies for reconstructing the practices, techniques, and technologies documented in Ms. Fr. 640. Reconstruction has been successfully employed by historians of science, art historians, conservators, experimental archaeologists, and a variety of other groups who each used a particular methodology for addressing questions about history. In the graduate seminars of the Making and Knowing Laboratory, students were guided through several skill-building activities before devising a research project of their own. Research in the laboratory emphasized a careful understanding of historical materials, a focus on the process rather than the outcome of reconstructions, and a synergistic relationship between textual research and laboratory work. I argue that our experimental method can best be understood as exploratory experimentation. Likewise, while the methods developed were specific to reconstruction of entries in Ms. Fr. 640, there are many other applications across a broad spectrum of historical research and pedagogy.