UC Berkeley

This dissertation is a history of useful knowledge in seventeenth-century Britain that examines what people meant when they described knowledge as useful and why it became the preeminent virtue of learning for the public. It traces the intellectual history of useful knowledge from popular didactic print to political proposals, to contemporary reflection on the term itself. Reading for the contemporary understanding of what makes knowledge useful reveals that it was in deliberations on how to teach Christian doctrine that the values of useful knowledge were first formulated. Attention to the pedagogy of “use” laid out in this theological literature is necessary to explain why the advocates of useful knowledge imagined it could end religious division and shape the manners of the laboring poor. This work shows how transformations in England’s political economy relied on projects to comprehensively educate its laboring population to be not only industrious workers but practical Christians.