Expertise : practical knowledge and the early modern state / edited by Eric H. Ash.

Practical knowledge and the early modern state

Chicago, Ill. : University of Chicago Press, [2010], ©2010.

259 pages : illustrations ; 26 cm.

Part I. Discerning expertise : (self)-fashioning the early modern expert -- Expertise ex stellis : comets, horoscopes, and politics in Renaissance Hungary / Darin Hayton -- Nestor denied : Francesco Filelfo's advice to princes on the crusade against the Turks / Margaret Meserve -- State building through building for the state : foreign and domestic expertise in Tudor fortification / Steven A. Walton -- Ahmad al-Damanhuri (1689-1778) and the utility of expertise in early modern Ottoman Egypt / Jane H. Murphy -- The Schumacher affair : reconfiguring academic expertise across dynasties in eighteenth-century Russia / Simon Werrett -- Part II. Expertise and the state : experts, political economy, and empire -- Experts, nature, and the making of Atlantic empiricism / Antonio Barrera-Osorio -- Organizing expertise : engineering and public works under Jean-Baptiste Colbert, 1662-83 / Michael S. Mahoney -- Leibniz and the wind machines / Andre Wakefield -- Enlightenment science and iconoclasm : the Brazilian naturalist Jose Vieira Couto / Junia Ferreira Furtado -- Political order and the ambivalence of expertise : Count Rumsford and welfare reform in late-eighteenth-century Munich / Anna Maerker -- Quality and the roots of manufacturing "expertise" in eighteenth-century Britain / William J. Ashworth.

Includes bibliographical references and index.