Historians of science have been exploring the sociological roots of 'modern science' for decades. A recent stream of literature has investigated the important role, not of major scientists, but of humbler figures such as artisans and other practitioners, in bringing about a transformation in the hierarchies of knowledge that made possible new alliances between natural philosophy, mathematisation, and experimentation. By stressing the contributions of 'minor' practitioners, the social history of science has increasingly challenged the narratives of scientific discoveries focused on individual scientists, and has contributed to understanding the 'scientific revolution' as a collective and socially embedded process.
In recent years, historians of science have deepened our understanding of these phenomena by directly engaging with the 'practical knowledge' that emerged from the world of artisans and practitioners. Practical texts – such as manuals, recipe books, books of arts, and other instructional texts – provide direct evidence of how, starting from the late medieval period, artisans and practitioners took to the written word for the first time in European history, setting in motion broader changes in the social circulation of knowledge. While they seek to reconstruct the epistemological consequences of the emergence of these social figures and of the texts they wrote, these studies provide a mainly conceptual analysis that does not seek to gauge the dimensions (in time or in space) of the phenomenon. Moreover, this literature does not explore the economic aspect of the emergence of this class of literate and epistemologically innovative figures.
The REAP project focuses on account books to study the diffusion of Hindu-Arabic numerals in actual commercial practices. First exploratory analyses of the emergence of these numbers in Italian, Netherlandish, and English accounts reveal some intriguing similarities in the patterns of adoption of this mathematics. These similarities suggest that studying this phenomenon can illuminate the dynamics of practical knowledge, a question that is of key interest for both economic historians and historians of science.