Janello Torriani, known in the Spanish-speaking world as Juanelo Turriano (Cremona, Italy ca. 1500 – Toledo, Spain 1585), is the greatest among Renaissance inventors and constructors of machines. Contemporary literates and mathematicians celebrated Janello Torriani and his creations in their writings. It is striking how such fame turned into nearly complete oblivion, leaving only a few clues of a blurred and distorted memory dispersed here and there. This book wishes to show the central role that artisans formed in the Vitruvian tradition played in demonstrating through practical mathematics an increasing and positive control over Nature, a step rooted in humanist culture and foundational for the understanding of those historical processes known as the Scientific and the Industrial Revolutions.

Giuseppe Campani, “Inventor Romae,” an Uncommon Genius offers an account of the life and creations of the most talented maker of optic lenses, silent clocks and projector clocks of the second half of the seventeenth century but also provides you with unique insights into the scientific and technological landscape of baroque Rome and its links to a broader European scene.

Strasbourg Cathedral’s astronomical clock is one of the most famous monuments to Time in the world. No other clock has been described and appreciated so often and in such a myriad of ways. There were three clocks built consecutively within the cathedral: the earlier fourteenth century clock has left little trace; a second clock was realized in 1570-1574; while the nineteenth century clock began as a proposal for repairs, but was intended by its maker as a replacement clock. This book gives a detailed outline of the artistic and technical components of the second clock, much of which survives, and it describes the astronomical indications and its underlying conceptual framework. The author has discovered a hitherto disregarded contemporary statement that the clock displays four ways of determining the ascendant as described by Ptolemy. He also shows that the Strasbourg clock is the result of a highly original reception of the architectural theory of Vitruvius and other mathematical and mechanical texts of Late Antiquity. Revised and updated translation from the German edition Die Straßburger Münsteruhr: Funktion und Bedeutung eines Kosmos-Modells des 16. Jahrhunderts. Published by GNT-Verlag in 1993. See inside this book.

The early modern era produced the Scientific Revolution, which originated our present understanding of the natural world. Concurrently, philosophers established the conceptual foundations of modernity. This rich and comprehensive volume surveys and illuminates the numerous and complicated interconnections between philosophical and scientific thought as both were radically transformed from the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century. The chapters explore reciprocal influences between philosophy and physics, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and other disciplines, and show how thinkers responded to an immense range of intellectual, material, and institutional influences. The volume offers a unique perspicuity, viewing the entire landscape of early modern philosophy and science, and also marks an epoch in contemporary scholarship, surveying recent contributions and suggesting future investigations for the next generation of scholars and students.

Knowledge, Patents, Power offers a sophisticated analysis of patenting practices in the early modern Dutch Republic and their detailed legal framework, as well as the uses of expert knowledge not only in producing inventions but in evaluating them for patent purposes.

A General History of Horology describes instruments used for the finding and measurement of time from Antiquity to the 21st century. In geographical scope it ranges from East Asia to the Americas. The instruments described are set in their technical and social contexts, and there is also discussion of the literature, the historiography and the collecting of the subject. The book features the use of case studies to represent larger topics that cannot be completely covered in a single book. The international body of authors have endeavoured to offer a fully world-wide survey accessible to students, historians, collectors, and the general reader, based on a firm understanding of the technical basis of the subject. At the same time as the work offers a synthesis of current knowledge of the subject, it also incorporates the results of some fundamamental, new and original research.

Before Romantic genius, there was ingenuity. Early modern ingenuity defined every person—not just exceptional individuals—as having their own attributes and talents, stemming from an “inborn nature” that included many qualities, not just intelligence. Through ingenuity and its family of related terms, early moderns sought to understand and appreciate differences between peoples, places, and things in an attempt to classify their ingenuities and assign professions that were best suited to one’s abilities. Logodaedalus, a prehistory of genius, explores the various ways this language of ingenuity was defined, used, and manipulated between 1470 and 1750. By analyzing printed dictionaries and other lexical works across a range of languages—Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, English, German, and Dutch—the authors reveal the ways in which significant words produced meaning in history and found expression in natural philosophy, medicine, natural history, mathematics, mechanics, poetics, and artistic theory.