This book argues that we can only understand transformations of nature studies in the Scientific Revolution if we take seriously the interaction between practitioners and scholars. These are not in opposition, however. Theory and practice are end points on a continuum, with some participants interested only in the practical, others only in the theoretical, and most in the murky intellectual and material world in between. It is this borderland where influence, appropriation, and collaboration have the potential to lead to new (...) methods, new subjects of enquiry, and new social structures of natural philosophy and science. The case for connection between theory and practice can be most persuasively drawn in the area of mathematics, which is the focus of this book. Practical mathematics was a growing field in early modern Europe and these essays are organised into three parts which contribute to the debate about the role of mathematical practice in the Scientific Revolution. First, they demonstrate the variability of the identity of practical mathematicians, and of the practices involved in their activities in early modern Europe. Second, readers are invited to consider what practical mathematics looked like and that although practical mathematical knowledge was transmitted and circulated in a wide variety of ways, participants were able to recognize them all as practical mathematics. Third, the authors show how differences and nuances in practical mathematics typically depended on the different contexts in which it was practiced: social, cultural, political, and economic particularities matter. Historians of science, especially those interested in the Scientific Revolution period and the history of mathematics will find this book and its ground-breaking approach of particular interest. (shrink)

The ancient philosopher Theophrastus described a gemstone called lyngurium, purported to be solidified lynx urine, in his work De lapidibus . Knowledge of the stone passed from him to other classical authors and into the medieval lapidary tradition, but there it was almost always linked to the 'learned master Theophrastus'. Although no physical example of the stone appears to have been seen or touched in ancient, medieval, or early modern times, its physical and medicinal properties were continually reiterated and elaborated (...) as if it did 'exist'. By the seventeenth century, it began to disappear from lapidaries, but with no attempt to explain previous authors' errors since it had never 'existed' anyway. In tracing the career of lyngurium, this study sheds some light on the transmission of knowledge from the classical world to the Renaissance and the changing criteria by which such knowledge was judged. (shrink)

It has long been shown that medieval builders primarily used geometrical constructions to design medieval architecture. The thought processes involved, however, have been considered to be remote from the natural philosophical speculations of the Scholastics, who, following Aristotle, had taken the basis of physics to be the study of dynamics, or change. However, investigations of the Expertises of Chartres, Florence, Milan, and other documents related to medieval building suggest that medieval architects, in speaking of their work, resort to recognizable dynamic (...) arguments, structured similarly to the speculations of Scholastic philosophers. These dynamic explanations of structural behaviour persist at least into the 17th century, but thereafter lost out to the arguments based on statics made by modern scholars attempting to explain the endurance of these structures. (shrink)