There were a number of economists in early modern Germany who, as their works indicate, faced regular criticism and personal attacks. Again and again, they had to defend and legitimize their work. Such apologetic formulas appear for the first time in the work of the Saxon councilor and writer Melchior von Osse (1506–57). This was no coincidence. Starting from the large and dynamic mining districts of the region, a new variant of economic thinking emerged at the end of the fifteenth century, characterized in particular by the fact that it extended the princely household over the entire territory. Ideas of this kind violated centuries-old scholarly traditions. This concerned both the question of occupations suitable for people of high status as well as the scope of what could legitimately be called a household or economy. The reason for this break with convention was the increasingly capitalist organization of mining, which fostered new forms of spatial imagination and governmental practice. However, irrespective of how important the idea of a territorial economy would become, it also placed a burden on economic scholars who were involved in its early dissemination. The legacy of disrupting the medieval politico-economic order will accompany them for centuries to come.
Recent research emphasizes that empiricist approaches already emerged long before the seventeenth and eighteenth century. While many of these contributions focus on specific professions, it is the aim of this article to supplement this discourse by describing certain social spaces that fostered empiricist attitudes. A particularly interesting example in this respect is the mining region of the Erzgebirge (Saxony) in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. The following article will use this mining district as a kind of historical laboratory, as a space not only for scientific observation but also as a structure within which specific forms of knowledge were socially tested, to show how the economic transformation of this region supported the rise of characteristic elements of empiricist thinking. It is common practice to link the appraisal of useful knowledge, (personal) experience and the distrust towards (scholastic) authorities in those days with only small minorities. By addressing not only the struggles of the commercial elites but also the challenges faced by the average resident of a mining town, this paper tries to add to this view by demonstrating how entire masses of people inhabiting the late medieval Erzgebirge were affected by and schooled to think in empiricist ways.
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