Problems With Practice

Reconstructing the logic of practices remains a challenge, and not for historians alone. I shall argue that an invocation of the ‘habitus’ as generating practices elides major problems. Without discarding Bourdieu’s contribution, I try to sketch an approach that insists on the role of cultural repertoires providing sets of context-specific models of action. Examples are drawn from my research on the transformation of scholarly ways of life, 1470–1630.