This chapter is an introduction to the Enlightenment mock arts, set out in three historical hypotheses. First, early-modern writers became increasingly interested in the cognitive (rather than simply material) value in the work of skilled technicians. The mock-arts were models for the intuitions involved in skilled manufacture, related to certain ineffable components of literary production. Second, the literary framing for those investigations was invariably satirical (or oblique and critical in other ways). As specialists in literary wit, authors of mock arts put themselves forward as experts in curiosity, invention and communication. Third, writers became more subtle in their assumptions about the print trade and the suitability of books as tools that might contribute to the communication of personal knowledge. Since convention defined that sort of knowledge by the impossibility of pinning it down in books, this opened another field for irony and indirection.

The mock arts written by Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and their circle touched on issues of mechanical instruction, but their satire depended on its application to incongruously non-mechanical subjects. It was in Gulliver’s Travels that Swift turned more directly to descriptions of material production and mechanical ingenuity. The framing of those descriptions in a travel narrative recalls Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Both texts reduced scenes of human ingenuity and manufacture to a proto-anthropological ground zero in distant and solitary locations. But reading Gulliver and Crusoe from a mock-technical perspective reveals a surprising reversal in their authors’ attitudes to mechanical ingenuity. Defoe, the propagandist for commerce, is sceptical about the value and cognitive significance of handicraft skill. Swift, by contrast, uses his commentary on mechanical technique to depict different richly-imagined ecologies of mind in the four parts of Gulliver’s Travels.

The status of the knowledge of early modern craft practitioners and artisans has long been a point of contention among scholars, and several historians recently have argued that artisanal knowledge was central to the emergence of early modern science. This chapter follows attitudes towards craft practitioners and artisans, beginning in antiquity, when many philosophers argued that practical knowledge (techne) was of lesser value than theoretical knowledge (episteme). Following the elevation of the mechanical arts in the Middle Ages and the proliferation of practical how-to manuals in the Renaissance, a growing appreciation for artisanal work grew among philosophers. Renaissance humanists elevated the intellectual status of artistic practice, and iconoclasts like Paracelsus railed against knowledge gained without direct experience, praising instead the knowledge of miners and alchemists. Architects, engineers, and artisans came to embody the Renaissance ideal of the “polymath,” and practical knowledge became a central component of the philosophy of Francis Bacon, as well as the experimental science that was institutionalized by groups such as the Royal Society of London. Following postcolonial critiques of Eurocentrism, some have suggested the history of science should embrace a broader ambit that includes practitioners’ knowledge.