Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 July 2020
This article analyzes two vernacular German books that offered learned guidance for how to use natural observation as a means of gaining knowledge of the weather. Published a combined seventy-seven times throughout the sixteenth century, the “Wetterbüchlein” (Weather booklet) and “Bauern Practica” (Peasants’ practica) were commercially successful and widely circulated. Printers marketed the books as being accessible to anyone and reinforced that claim in the paratextual features of the books. In text and image, these books promoted the idea that even common people could participate in the production of knowledge based on the proper observation of nature.
I thank Ulrike Strasser, Alison G. Stewart, Robert S. Westman, and Daniel J. Vitkus, as well as the two RQ reviewers, for thoughtful and constructive feedback. My research was made possible by support from a doctoral scholarship funded by the Rolf and Ursula Schneider-Stiftung at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, a Herzog-Ernst-Scholarship sponsored by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung at the University and Research Library Erfurt-Gotha, and a Fulbright Fellowship.