ABSTRACT
The practical arts required an extraordinary range of experiential knowledge on the part of their practitioners. The laboratory, the garden, the field, the studio, the pharmacy, and the sickroom differed fundamentally from the classroom and the study, where the kinds of experience not directly entailed in the actions of lecturing, listening, and reading could be held at a distance, as an object of reflection rather than as the inescapable matter of the work at hand. Their practitioners developed techniques to manage the too-muchness of experience, recasting it in ways that allowed them to identify, remember, and retrieve those aspects of it most germane to the things they were trying to accomplish. The essays in this section, focusing on medicine, medical botany, and alchemy reflect this reality in different ways. What they all have in common is the development of visual tools to corral the complexities of experience, whether first- or second-hand, translating it in graphic and pictorial forms that made it assimilable and usable in real-time situations.
