In the Workshop of History: Making, Writing, and Meaning

What does it mean to reconstruct historical experience? In a sense, all historians attempt to reconstruct historical experience out of the vestiges—the texts, practices, and artifacts—of the past, and the cultural historian in particular seeks to reconstruct the material and mental worlds of past ages. What techniques are available to the historian? Textual sources are the most familiar; however, technical writings (manuals, recipes, treatises) by early modern European artisans and practitioners are seldom able to provide sufficient information to actually carry out a procedure or make an object, and so it is not clear what these technical writings were intended to convey. Why, then, were such techniques written down? What, indeed, was the relationship between making and writing for the artisan? If the historian cannot rely on texts for the reconstruction of this component of historical experience, perhaps knowledge gained through hands-on experience—whether of craft techniques, of sensation, or of historical actions—can be employed as a reliable source by historians. Can reenactment and reconstruction give insight not only into the material conditions but also the mental worldview of the past? Through the examination of a variety of case studies focusing especially on the replication of craft techniques, this article considers what may be learned by the historian through historical reconstruction.