The etchings of noble women working as non-professional artists outside the commercial spaces of the print trade have long been under-appreciated and even dismissed for their amateur status. During their lifetime, etchings by Isabella Byron, Lady Carlisle; Lady Louisa Augusta Greville; and Miss Amabel Yorke, later Lady Polworth and her younger cousin Miss Caroline York were valued and preserved in the private spaces of albums compiled by the prominent collectors Horace Walpole and Richard Bull. With this reassessment, the legacy of their work, its cultural and social currency, and its reception among contemporaries can be reinserted as a vital component in the broader story of women printmakers.

Several linked revolutions in the use, study and appreciation of older books occurred over a little more than half a century, between the 1830s and the early 1890s. Changes in the manufacture and presentation of new books in this period, dominated by mechanisation, have been much discussed elsewhere. What, on the other hand, of earlier books? What of material questions concerning these? How and where could they be studied? What opportunities were available for a population whose wealth, literacy and education were changing fundamentally? How and when did tastes and values change? How did the book trade and customers accommodate or lead change?

An alternative way of initiating the purchase consists for the customer in requesting a specific product. The way requests are formatted, and the way they are produced by looking and possibly pointing at the products, displays whether the customer is a connoisseur or a novice, and project the relevant service expected. The seller provides for a differentiated response to requests displaying more or less knowledge of the requested product. Whereas customers knowing what they request just name the product and are fetched with it, customers not fully knowing what they request are responded to in a more expanded way by the seller. The seller engages in informing – providing a diversity of verbal information about the cheese, within an expert and relatively standardized discourse –  and in showing the product, associating visual characteristics with verbal descriptions. When this is considered by the participants as an insufficient basis for decision-making, the seller offers them to taste the cheese. In this way, the access to the materiality of cheese is provided, depending on the sequential unfolding of the interaction, in a stepwise way ordering vision, talk, and closer sensorial approaches, like touch, smell, and taste.

This chapter explores the ideathat a discernible and Hebraic epistemological process is present, relevant, and persistent across the Christian Scriptures. Moreover, when looking for present-day analogs for biblical epistemology, the scientific enterpriseproposed by Michael Polanyi, Marjorie Grene, Thomas Kuhn, et al. best fits the bill.