Apprenticeship in early modern Europe

"The subject of apprenticeship, one of the more enduring of all economic arrangements, has received more attention from economic historians and the economics profession at large in recent years. Yet, compared, say, with issues such as the economics of slave labor or the rise of formal human capital and literacy, apprenticeship -- the mechanism through which practical skills were transferred from generation to generation -- has not been the subject of much research until the last decades"--