Introduction

What were the rules, norms, and expectations by which people in the premodern world conducted themselves as they translated experience onto paper, generating and preserving experience within the bodies of scientific knowledge available to them? As this volume demonstrates, such translation was no simple matter. Aristotelian rules of method took experience to be mutable and therefore an unreliable a source of knowledge. They set a high bar, informing experience’s relation to the governing rules, norms, and expectations of science. The norms demanded that, first, sense perceptions be collated and, second, these collated experiences be translated onto parchment and paper, before they could count as experience. Only through skilled practices—applying the proper types of reasoning to sense perceptions, inferring from perceptions, images, and memories, and associating different epistemic or even ontological realms—could experiences be constructed as scientific, and from there be made into potential candidates for true and certain knowledge.