Transmission of technical knowledge in pre-industrial age: Genoese ship-builders from the Middle Age to the Modern Age.

The historiography on the productive activities in the Middle Ages and in the first years of the Modern age, has privileged their economic aspects or has focalised the attention on the productive processes and on manufacturing. A lesser interest is given to the actors of the production, except for what concerns the legal and institutional aspects linked to the artisan corporations.
In many Italian cities, besides the social stratification, there was an intermediate cultural layer among men of learning/scientists and illiterates. Technicians and "practicals", employed in manufacturing production, belong to this intermediate layer. "Practicals" were far from the erudite culture - which was solely theoretical and transmitted through books usually written in Latin - but they had shared the use of the "volgare" and often the use of drawing. They shared also a written language, called "mercantesca", and were used to transmit their knowledge by means of experience, starting from apprenticeship, but not only reduced to mere verbalisation. There is a specific conceptual modality by which practicals do elaborate their experiences. This modality may be individuated in the analogical process.
"Practicals" had only exceptionally some contacts with the erudite culture. It is not clear what kind of consequences and repercussions these rare events could have occurred in the productive world.
It seems fundamental, in these historical context, to reconstruct the sequence of work experiences assignable to individual artisan masters (not only to the most famous in their "art", but for the larger the better number of them). It seems also important to restore the consistence and the duration in time of relationships and of master/apprentice sequences.
For what concerns the Genoese Republic, it is progress the accomplishment of a database on the persons operating in different yards: shipwrights, caulks, woodcutters, blacksmiths, copper casters, ropemakers, etc., which counts, till now, over 2000 names related to the period from the 15th to the 18th century.