Science and Instruments in Seventeenth-Century Italy by Silvio A. Bedini

Abstract

346 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE its purchase by the Museum of History of Science in 1948. Forms of instruments are transmitted across cultures and are altered to suit local measuring systems and observing practices, asJean-Pierre Verdet shows in his essay on two 19th-century Indian quadrants, one of which is at Oxford. The book also includes A. V. Simlock’s introduction to early litera­ ture on scientific instruments, papers on science in the writings of Chaucer and Lewis Dodgson, and a delightful essay byJ. A. Bennett on Robert T. Gunther’s contribution to the founding of the Whipple Museum of the History of Science in Cambridge. In summary, this volume offers a fit tribute to Francis Maddison’s wide learning, love of language, and knowledge of objects. Peggy Aldrich Kidwell Dr. Kidwell watches over the mathematics collections at the Smithsonian Institu­ tion’s National Museum of American History. She has published on the history of astrophysics and on mathematical instruments. Science and Instruments in Seventeenth-Century Italy. By Silvio A. Bedini. Aldershot and Brookfield, Vt.: Variorum (Ashgate), 1994. Pp. xii+338; illustrations, notes, index. $105.00. It is arguably the case that historians of science and technology have taken far too long to appreciate the significance ofinstruments. As Gerard L’E. Turner recently remarked, there is not merely much to be learned from the instruments themselves but much, as well, from the social and economic conditions that went into their manu­ facture. Indeed, instruments are so much a part ofscientific develop­ ment that many sciences, such as chemistry, could scarcely exist with­ out the elaborate apparatus of spectroscopy or crystallography. It is for reasons such as these that the bringing together of Silvio Bedini’s studies of Italian instruments and their collections, written over a quarter-century, provides the opportunity to assess the meaning of scientific instruments and their makers in the 17th century. Instrument collections once united patron and maker in a cele­ bration of skill and prestige. Patrons, of course, have attracted much attention recently—as in the work of Mario Biagioli and Richard Westfall—but Bedini demonstrates that the convergence of a wide social spectrum, from maker to princely master, ought to be more fully appreciated. Prestige was a factor in Galileo’s gift of a telescope to the Venetian Senate. Prestige, as Biagioli has shown us, resides in the ties that gifts could bind. But, as Bedini reminds us, instruments induced a particularly nasty “priority” dispute between Galileo and the Milanese Aurelio Capra over the compass. The stakes of state support were so high that they prompted an accusation ofplagiarism against Galileo; he was completely vindicated before the Venetian magistrates. TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 347 Bedini is particularly effective in marking the development of technique in constructing instruments like the celebrated telescope. There were enormous problems of production to be overcome in the evolution of the device—especially regarding the difficulties of lens grinding and polishing, which preoccupied Galileo throughout much of his life. Bedini argues that Galileo, his Italian workmen, and some of his friends in the Collegio Romano produced many of the modifications which surpassed the telescope makers of Flanders and Brussels. Bedini’s account of the optical work of Guiseppe Cam­ pant of Rome and his association with numerous prominent patrons from Pope Alexander VII to the kings of Poland, Spain, and France demonstrates how essential instruments were in the establishment of the place of science in the early modern world. The genesis of instrument collections reveals much about the status of science. It is clear that historians of science and technology could make good use of a comprehensive inventory of the instru­ ments now scattered throughout numerous cabinets. Many museum collections were composed of the dramatic and the artistic, but there were also working collections, such as that of the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher. In an impressive study of such “citadels of learning,” Bedini sorts through the Museo Settala in Milan and the scientific collections of numerous Roman cardinals—among them the Museo Chigi of the nephew of Pope Alexander VII. When Kircher came from Germany to the Collegio Romano in 1633, he expanded his sphere of influence into...