Manual Work and Mental Work

In the early modern period, numerous texts deal with professions by presenting
the knowledge required in each case, detailing individual fields of activity, purpose, origin and prestige. The course of argumentation was humanistic, insofar as it mostly started from the human being. The ancient idea of the primacy of mental work over manual work was influential. This work illuminates how Spanish representations of knowledge, professions and outstanding professional representatives are shown. Mechanical arts and artes liberales are presented on the basis of individual professions and the higher faculties of medicine, theology and jurisprudence with their representatives follow.
This book is a translation of an original German edition. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. The author (with the support of colleagues) has subsequently revised the text further in an endeavour to refine the work stylistically.