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The disruptive figure of the “striped layman” appeared in printed texts and images around the year 1500 in the southern German lands. This essay shows how it came to represent a new kind of reader of vernacular medical publications. Exploring the illustrated books of the Strasbourg surgeon-apothecary Hieronymus Brunschwig, their local context of humanist discourse, and the visual practice of their publisher, Johann Grüninger, I argue that their oft-neglected woodcuts of people in striped clothes constitute powerful visual commentary of Brunschwig's (and others’) mission to impart medical agency and expertise to the “common man” at the eve of the Reformation. 

Through a close reading and reconstruction of technical recipes for ephemeral artworks in a manuscript compiled in Toulouse ca. 1580 (BnF MS Fr. 640), we question whether ephemeral art should be treated as a distinct category of art. The illusion and artifice underpinning ephemeral spectacles shared the aims and, frequently, the materials and techniques of art more generally. Our analysis of the manuscript also calls attention to other aspects of art making that reframe consideration of the ephemeral, such as intermediary processes, durability, the theatrical and transformative potential of materials, and the imitation and preservation of lifelikeness. 

Jenny Boulboullé demonstrates in this article how multi-layered and open-ended manuals could be. She focuses on the so-called Mayerne manuscript, a seventeenth-century source text, comprising more than 300 recipes and ‘how-to’ instructions. Many of the entries are dated and include geographical and professional information that identify artisans and master painters as sources of detailed descriptions of materials and techniques. The article deconstructs an interpretation of Theodore de Mayerne’s recipe compilation as a handbook intended for practical use, and instead shows that many voices lay behind Mayerne’s extensive documentation of artisanal know how. Boulboullé argues that the manuscript was perhaps never intended for publication, but that it provides an exceptional testimony to the practice of an early modern ethnographer of artisanal working methods. A closer look at Mayerne’s practice of note taking as a physician suggests that it functioned as a working tool to document technical and artisanal knowledge of materials. 

A research group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science on “Itineraries of Materials, Recipes, Techniques, and Knowledge in the Early Modern World” held a series of workshops (2014–2015) on the movement of knowledge(materials, techniques, objects) across Eurasia, resulting in an edited volume. Participants articulated a framework of “entangled itineraries,” “material complexes,” and “nodes of convergence” by which historians might follow routes ofknowledge-making extending over very long distances and/or great spans of time. The key concepts are (1) “material complex” denoting the constellation of substances, practices, techniques, beliefs, and values that accrete as knowledge around materials; (2) the “relational field,” the social, intellectual, economic, emotional domain formed by a “node of convergence”—often a hub of trade and exchange—within which a material complex crystalizes; and (3) “itineraries,” or the routes taken by materials through which they stabilize and/ or transform.