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Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France. A Digital Critical Edition and English Translation of BnF Ms. Fr. 640 (launched 2020) is the culmination of the Making and Knowing Project’s work since 2014 to transcribe, translate, encode, and annotate Fr. 640. This hitherto unstudied Middle French text by an anonymous “author-practitioner” contains over 900 entries detailing artisans’ techniques, first-hand experiments, and observations about everyday life in and around sixteenth-century Toulouse. Fr. 640 contains a wide variety of instructions, including for metal working (especially casting), drawing, painting, and varnish making, among many others. Like Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, this extraordinary manuscript gives invaluable insights into the continuous experimentation through which art objects were created by skilled labor, and how the process of artistic creation yielded insights into the workings of nature. https://edition640.makingandknowing.org/#/