But Some Make Red This Way: The Pedagogy of Variation in Sixteenth-Century Household Manuals

• In Event: Humanism, Scholasticism, Pedagogy, and Language in Late Medieval England and Early Modern Germany

Abstract

We know little about the procedures of vocational education in the sixteenth century, despite its ubiquity. This paper examines German pamphlets on household chemistry (called Kunstbüchlein), not for their role in the history of science, but as an oblique approach to the teaching techniques by which everyday people taught each other practical tasks. I argue that far from a rote approach based on memorization or rigidly prescribed steps, the contributors to the pamphlets composed and arranged their texts to exhibit a “pedagogy of variation” that intended for readers to develop their own subjective judgment and to be capable of improvising and adapting to new situations.

Author

• Philip Grace, Texas Lutheran University