Foreword: Why Did Rudolf von Deventer Put Pen to Paper?

Texts of practical techniques, often called “books of art”, proliferated from about 1400. First in manuscript and then in print, such “how-to” texts found an audience and some even became best sellers for entrepreneurial printers. While such collections of technical procedures—sometimes consisting almost entirely of recipe-like instructions—had been written down since antiquity, the boom in these books around 1400 represented a new cultural development. Before 1400 books of practice had been almost exclusively written by individuals from the scholarly world. In contrast, around 1400 artisans themselves took up the pen, including painters, gunpowder-makers, ships’ pilots, fortification-builders and dancing