Manuals offering instruction or information originated in ancient times and proliferated widely in both premodern and modern eras. Their readers have ranged from diverse individuals who have wanted to know how to make or do something to specialists using standard professional guidebooks. Manuals have a history of their own. Their cultural and historical significance goes far beyond the hugely varied specific topics that they treat. Historians have found in them rich sources for understanding practices, technologies, cultural attitudes, beliefs, and ideas.
The word manual derives from the Latin manualis, pertaining to the hand, and in late Latin, manuale, a handbook. Manuals are printed instructions (or often now, the *digital equivalent) on how to operate equipment such as, for example, a camera or a dishwasher. They include “how-to” books—how to repair your Toyota, how to fix the toilet, how to embroider, how to play golf, how to draw animals, how to build a chair. They frequently focus on manual tasks, but they are by no means so limited—how to write a sentence, how to sell your novel, how to speak effectively in public. Although they are often oriented toward the general public, providing instruction on something someone would otherwise not know how to do, some are aimed at specialists. Molecular biologists use Molecular Cloning: A Laboratory Manual, which sold ninety-five thousand copies in its first two editions (1982 and 1989). It is now in its fourth edition (2012), with parts published online. The best-selling Chicago Manual of Style, the handbook of writers, including historians, and editors, appeared in its seventeenth edition in 2017. The controversy-producing Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, first published in 1952 and now in its fifth edition, is a mainstay of the profession of psychiatry and related fields.
Manuals for both the general public and specialists are ubiquitous. They accompany products, are available online, and often sell millions of copies. They are also avidly sought as collectables and as needed guides to such things as antique cars. But until relatively recently, scholars did not consider them interesting beyond their very specific concrete topics. Historians at one time viewed manuals from premodern times in the same restricted way—created as instruction for particular needs and without great import beyond this. This view has changed primarily for two reasons.
First, historians of science, of technology, and of culture have become interested in the practices and the processes detailed in these manuals and in their accompanying intellectual frameworks. Experimental re-creation of craft recipes and instructions (such as for making a blue pigment, for example) have shed much new light on craft and technological practices in the premodern world and have illuminated attitudes toward those practices. An ongoing focus of research is the role of the artisan in the development of the new empirical sciences of the seventeenth century (including the adoption of artisanal values such as an appreciation for handwork, for observation and experience, and for experiment). Craft handbooks and technical manuals constitute important sources for this research.
Second, deeper study of premodern manuals has brought an understanding of how richly diverse the *genre is, not only in particular subject matters such as navigation or painting or fortification, but in the authors and readers of such books, who ranged from the humble to the high elite, and even royal, from skilled practitioners to scholars and princes. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, practices, technologies, machines, and instruments gained an allure, a cultural fascination that developed for complicated reasons. These included an increasing appreciation for objects, the growing practice of conspicuous consumption by elites, and the rising status of certain kinds of practically trained individuals such as painters, sculptors, architects, printers, and engravers. In addition, in an era before modern professionalization and specialization, certain practitioners achieved a kind of professional mobility—sculptors could become architects, carpenters could become cartographers, printers and engravers could become architects and designers of gardens. There was also increased interchange on substantive matters in locations such as printshops and arsenals—what have been called trading zones—between workshop-trained artisans and university-trained men.
All this was facilitated by the great proliferation of practical and technical writings. Some were in manuscript; some were printed in pamphlets on cheap paper. Others were printed on high-quality paper and even leather bound. Many were illustrated, some strikingly so. Such manuals did not originate with printing—there are substantial numbers of ancient and medieval examples—but printing did bring about their huge proliferation. Although some were directed toward practitioners, many were not. Topics were wide ranging, from falconry to fencing, from hunting to silk making, from gardening to winemaking. Beyond artisanal subjects (or subjects that involved making something) there were many others, including secretary manuals for government officials, manuals for writing or calligraphy, and mirrors for princes providing advice on how to rule.
One reason for the great popularity of manuals has to do with the information that they contained. University-educated humanists, for example, did not have access to workshop apprenticeships where hands-on practice was acquired. Some of this heretofore tacit knowledge, which they desired for a variety of reasons, was now explained in craft manuals. Similarly, individual householders could learn the rudiments of beer making and remedies for illnesses. Recently employed secretaries and other officeholders could learn how to best execute their new duties. Professional mobility and the rising status of arts such as painting, sculpture, and architecture meant that there was an ongoing need for new information when individuals moved from one profession to another or when they acquired an interest in a practical art for which they had no practical background.
One kind of manual that proliferated in the premodern world were books of recipes, often called “books of secrets.” These books contained recipes and formulas of all sorts—for craft processes such as cloth dying, pigment making, food and drink preparation, and medicinal recipes. They originated in late antiquity but were published in the thousands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Many households owned such books. Men and women used, modified, exchanged, discussed, and experimented with the recipes, making households important centers for empirical knowledge and experimentation.
In addition to the medicinal recipes contained in books of secrets, hundreds of manuals on health and healing were printed and used both by medical practitioners including physicians and by laypeople. These books included manuals for midwives such as Nicholas Culpepper’s often reprinted Directory for Midwives (1651). Another subset of manuals addressed surgery, including Ambroise Paré’s Dix livres de la chirurgie (Ten books of surgery, 1564), which contained detailed illustrations as well as discussion of instruments.
Practical manuals of other kinds circulated in response to particular technologies. Accompanying the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century development of gunpowder artillery were numerous handbooks for gunners, including many manuscript examples from German lands. The bastion fortification that was invented and widely constructed in the sixteenth century as a response to that artillery saw the emergence of manuals in both manuscript and print emphasizing the importance of measurement for this new type of fortification, as well as the importance of designing forts adapted to the unique topographies of particular sites. An important example is Francesco de Marchi’s Della architettura militare (On military architecture, composed 1545–65, published 1599).
In some cases, manuals overlapped with more formal treatises. Architects and patrons collected architectural treatises and commentaries on Vitruvius’s De architectura (On architecture), the only complete ancient architectural treatise to survive. They also collected illustrated manuals containing architectural instructions and exemplars (such as images of diverse forms of capitals to be placed on columns). The line between manuals, conceived as books of instruction and practical information, and treatises, larger, more systematic writings, is blurred, in part because the latter often contained plenty of practical information. A subgenre that stands at the border between manuals and treatises comprised machine books and “theaters of machines.” These books explained how machines were built and how they could be used and illustrated possible variations of their component parts.
Shipping and navigation was a developing area that produced numerous manuals. Muslim nautical manuals (rahmani) proliferated from the eleventh century. They provided sailing instructions and information about specific coasts and features, especially in the Indian Ocean but also far beyond. Manuals on navigation appeared much later in European countries, as transoceanic exploration and commerce exploded from the late fifteenth century through the eighteenth, and as European navies expanded to enormous size. European navigation manuals, often used in pedagogy, served the urgent need to train sailors and navigators. They also reflect an ongoing conflict about who should control navigation—skilled practitioners who had extensive oceanic experience or mathematically trained scholars who could chart courses on paper.
In early fifteenth-century European painting, sculpture, and other decorative arts, the new classicizing approaches and new methodologies such as artists’ perspective led to the proliferation of manuals and other writings on these topics. Both practitioners and nonpractitioners produced books on the arts, including painting, sculpture, goldsmithing, and ceramics. In the late 1390s, Cennino Cennini, a painter in the school of Giotto, wrote his craftsman’s handbook (Il libro d’arte, The book of art). In the 1430s, Leon Battista Alberti, a learned humanist, dedicated his Della pittura (On painting) to Filippo Brunelleschi, inventor, goldsmith, and architect of the Florentine Duomo. The painter Piero della Francesca wrote tracts on perspective and on mathematics. In the sixteenth century, the artist from Nuremberg Albrecht Dürer wrote manuals on painting, mathematics, and the proportions of the human figure; the goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini wrote not only his autobiography but tracts on goldsmithing, sculpture, and casting. An author on ceramics, Cipriano Piccolpasso, was a humanist and military officer whose brother was a master of majolica (the elegantly painted ceramics of the Italian *Renaissance). Piccolpasso’s treatise on pottery (written around 1557 but not published until the nineteenth century) was filled with practical instructions and illustrations.
Other subgenres developed out of other circumstances. Agriculture and gardening manuals emerged along with new crops, new foods from around the world, new systems of agriculture, new systems of irrigation and hydration, and magnificent villas surrounded by gardens. These include the Arabic Katub al-Filāh (Books of husbandry), which proliferated on the Iberian Peninsula (al-Andalus) and in the eastern Mediterranean.
Manuals on mining and ore processing accompanied the central European mine boom that developed after 1450 and then the development of huge silver mines by the Spanish in Potosí in the New World (present-day Bolivia). They were written by learned humanists such as Georg Agricola, whose De re metallica (On metals, 1556) contained striking illustrations; by mine overseers such as the Sienese Vannoccio Biringuccio; and by practicing assayers and minters of coins such as Lazarus Ercker. The consumers of such books were not primarily miners, but princes whose territorial income depended on mining, mine investors, and undoubtedly also the many midlevel people who lived and worked in the mining areas of central Europe.
In China, Song Yingxing’s Tiangong kaiwu (The works of Heaven and the inception of things, 1637) treated practical crafts, including the fabrication of ceramics and of sweeteners, the construction of carts, papermaking, and jewelry making. It was not a book of instructions but one in which universal principles and the cosmological order were connected and understood though practical technologies.
In all, manuals were published in the hundreds and thousands and cannot be simply categorized as instruction books directed at people who wanted guidance in making something. Rather, the complex variety of such books is matched by an equally complex crowd of readers from diverse walks of life, who used and understood them in diverse ways.
Despite this great variety, developments in manual writing can be discerned from premodern times to the modern. Premodern manuals often explicated an entire craft or practice, such as painting, or metallurgy, or agriculture. Modern manuals more frequently instruct on a single piece of machinery, equipment, or tool, such as a car or drill press, or they provide specific *protocols to highly specialized professions such as molecular biology. Premodern tool or equipment use was frequently preceded by informal or formal apprenticeships in a trade that used the object, making a manual superfluous. Modern use is frequently preceded by the delivery of a package to a relatively unskilled person, making a manual essential. (Galileo’s military compass and the manual he wrote to be purchased with it were prescient!)
For both premodern and modern manuals however, diagrams and visual images have often been essential. Indeed, technical diagrams and illustrations have undergone a striking development within the pages of manuals from the fourteenth century until the present.
Pamela O. Long
See also accounting; coins; diagrams; files; knowledge; maps; media; observing; printed visuals