Apprenticeship is an extremely widespread method of transmitting technical and vocational knowledge, both historically and geographically: from contracts drawn up on papyrus in the 1st century AD to notarial contracts of the medieval and modern eras, right up to the contemporary world, where apprenticeship is often cited as a possible solution to youth unemployment, as an alternative to school-based training considered too theoretical. Beyond the similarities, apprenticeships have played different roles in early modern European societies, often overlapping, particularly in rural areas, with service relationships and specific family models. The role played by apprenticeship in the economic developments of various European regions has been the subject of debate and, according to some studies (Morgan Kelly, Joel Mokyr and Cormac O’Grada, 2015), one of the contributing factors to the English Industrial Revolution was the supposed technical superiority of the workforce trained through apprenticeship. In early modern Europe, apprenticeship denoted a relationship involving the transmission of technical knowledge from a master craftsman or woman to a young person, generally implying cohabitation and the assumption of parental authority in place of the parents. Contracts sometimes specified that the master craftsman undertook to behave towards the apprentice as a ‘good father’. The sources available to historians are varied: censuses, guild regulations, judicial records and, above all, contracts.
Anna Bellavitis (Sat,) studied this question.