Quote of Note | Anthony Grafton

“Historians of technology and science like Pamela Long and Pamela Smith have taught us to see the exciting potentialities of Renaissance workshops, from the houses of printers to those of smiths and apothecaries. They have revealed these shops…as ‘trading zones’ where skills and practices were swapped. In early modern Europe’s imagined society of orders, those who worked had dirty zones. But in the printing shop, for example, everyone had to think and everyone had soiled fingers.