UseFool brings together a corpus of previously unexplored Arabic technical sources that illustrate how to exploit the properties of natural substances in order to entertain and deceive. The project considers for the first time the technical knowledge of nature as applied by merchants, charlatans, craftsmen, and entertainers in the streets, markets, and other public and private urban spaces of the Arabo-Islamic Mediaeval and early modern world. Erudite scholars and street performers alike were engaged with the knowledge of nature and its applications: UseFool investigates the parallel development of this interest in the different social and intellectual groups.The project aims to write a new chapter in the social, cultural, and material history of knowledge, which includes thus far marginalized groups as well as their refined forms of technical knowledge, often hastily dismissed as ‘popular’. The project aims to fill a considerable gap in the Mediaeval and early modern history of knowledge and technology. It will study the manipulation of both nature and human perception in Arabic technical literature, the different performers engaged in these practices, their tools and practical knowledge, not to mention their uncanny ability to use common-sense ideas and beliefs as a pivot for their deceitful occupations. The UseFool project will work in parallel on two primary and overarching research goals, namely (a) to understand and describe the technical knowledge applied to the manipulation of nature and perception, focusing on the two complementary applications of entertainment and fraud; and (b) to map the intricate network of the sources of this literature, dealing with the properties of natural substances, from their acquisition as antique and late antique heritage to their reception in Mediaeval Europe.
At the core of UseFool’s textual corpus are four technical handbooks on entertainment and illusion composed in Arabic between the 6th/12th and the 9th/15th century. The experts who made their living on the streets worked with inexpensive and easily available materials, their devices meant for a large and relatively quick fruition. Their knowledge looked at nature from a different angle, certainly not from a lower step. This core is combined with other complementary sources, such as the handbooks for the inspector of the market. The sources about entertainment and fraud share many interests with the more erudite scientific tradition, as observed also in parallel cultural contexts of the same period. All Arabic technical handbooks engaged with entertainment and fraud give ample space to the useful and occult properties of mineral, vegetal, and animal substances (manāfiʿ and ḫawāṣṣ). This strong presence shows how the roots of this genre go back to the early Abbasid period, when the Arabo-Islamic culture acquired the huge antique and late antique lore of natural properties. One of the most striking features of this technical literature is the deafening silence of theory, especially when compared to its erudite counterpart, as if it was of no concern to practitioners, i.e. the real interest lay in the technical know-how and its concrete results. The lack of a theoretical dimension has traditionally developed into a derogative argument to consider this knowledge a second-class lore, more superstitious than technical. UseFool aims to overturn this negative image, and aims to reconstruct the bodies of knowledge implicit in the technical procedures described in the sources.
Usefool’s methodology is interdisciplinary. It integrates the philological, linguistic, and historical analyses of written sources with the experimental replication of the material and sensory reality behind those texts. Moreover, the project’s methodology envisages a third step, i.e. re-enactment, that is the performative and audience-bound aspects of such procedures. The project seeks to reconstruct the technical notions (‘kernels of knowledge’), the material reality, and the performative component entailed in the sources by replicating procedures in the laboratory and re-enacting their stagecraft.
