Schools of Empiricism: Perspectives on Central European Mining Regions of the Early Modern Age as Laboratories of Modern Knowledge Cultures

Friedolin Lingg Andreas ()
Additional contact information
Friedolin Lingg Andreas: Lessingstraße 62, D-50825KölnGermany

Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte / Economic History Yearbook, 2021, vol. 62, issue 1, 261-289

Abstract: Recent research emphasizes that empiricist approaches already emerged long before the seventeenth and eighteenth century. While many of these contributions focus on specific professions, it is the aim of this article to supplement this discourse by describing certain social spaces that fostered empiricist attitudes. A particularly interesting example in this respect is the mining region of the Erzgebirge (Saxony) in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. The following article will use this mining district as a kind of historical laboratory, as a space not only for scientific observation but also as a structure within which specific forms of knowledge were socially tested, to show how the economic transformation of this region supported the rise of characteristic elements of empiricist thinking. It is common practice to link the appraisal of useful knowledge, (personal) experience and the distrust towards (scholastic) authorities in those days with only small minorities. By addressing not only the struggles of the commercial elites but also the challenges faced by the average resident of a mining town, this paper tries to add to this view by demonstrating how entire masses of people inhabiting the late medieval Erzgebirge were affected by and schooled to think in empiricist ways.

Keywords: History of economic thought; history of knowledge; economic philosophy; mining history; economic anthropology; economic transformation; Erzgebirge (Saxony). Wissensgeschichte; Geschichte des ökonomischen Denkens; Wirtschaftsphilosophie; Bergbaugeschichte; Wirtschaftsanthropologie; Ökonomische Transformation; Erzgebirge (Sachsen) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A B D L N O P Q R Z (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/jbwg-2021-0010 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:jbwige:v:62:y:2021:i:1:p:261-289:n:10

DOI: 10.1515/jbwg-2021-0010

Access Statistics for this article

Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte / Economic History Yearbook is currently edited by Dieter Ziegler

More articles in Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte / Economic History Yearbook from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().