This book considers Wren's 'other' career as an astronomer, and shows how science informed his architectural philosophy.

A life of Moore, 17th-century mathematician and scientist involved in the draining of the fens, the building of the mole at Tangier, and the foundation of the Royal Observatory.

The spread of Renaissance culture in England coincided with the birth of the profession of architecture, whose practitioners soon became superior to simple builders in social standing and perceived intellectual prowess. This stimulating book, which focuses in particular on the scientist, mathematician, and architect Sir Christopher Wren, explores the extent to which this new professional identity was based on expertise in the mathematical arts and sciences. Featuring drawings, instruments, paintings, and other examples of the material culture of English architecture, the book discusses the role of mathematics in architectural design and building technology. It begins with architectural drawing in the 16th century, moves to large-scale technical drawing under Henry VIII, considers Inigo Jones and his royal buildings and Christopher Wren and the dome of St. Paul's, and concludes with the architectural education of George III. Interweaving text and visual image, the book investigates the boundaries between art and science in architecture--the most artistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the arts. Exhibition Schedule: Yale Center for British Art (opens February 2010)

A biography of Sir Christopher Wren from one of Britain's best writers and historians

How did early modern scientists interpret Galileo’s influential Two New Sciences? In 1638, Galileo was over seventy years old, blind, and confined to house arrest outside of Florence. With the help of friends and family, he managed to complete and smuggle to the Netherlands a manuscript that became his final published work, Two New Sciences. Treating diverse subjects that became the foundations of mechanical engineering and physics, this book is often depicted as the definitive expression of Galileo’s purportedly modern scientific agenda. In Reading Galileo, Renée Raphael offers a new interpretation of Two New Sciences which argues instead that the work embodied no such coherent canonical vision. Raphael alleges that it was written—and originally read—as the eclectic product of the types of discursive textual analysis and meandering descriptive practices Galileo professed to reject in favor of more qualitative scholarship. Focusing on annotations period readers left in the margins of extant copies and on the notes and teaching materials of seventeenth-century university professors whose lessons were influenced by Galileo’s text, Raphael explores the ways in which a range of early-modern readers, from ordinary natural philosophers to well-known savants, responded to Galileo. She highlights the contrast between the practices of Galileo’s actual readers, who followed more traditional, “bookish” scholarly methods, and their image, constructed by Galileo and later historians, as “modern” mathematical experimenters. Two New Sciences has not previously been the subject of such rigorous attention and analysis. Reading Galileo considerably changes our understanding of Galileo’s important work while offering a well-executed case study in the reception of an early-modern scientific classic. This important text will be of interest to a wide range of historians—of science, of scholarly practices and the book, and of early-modern intellectual and cultural history.

The author charts the development of architectural theory and practice from Elizabeth I to George IV. Questions of style, technology, and the social framework are resolved as separable but always essential components of the building worlds.