Abstract
AbstractEarly modern books about mathematical instruments are typically well illustrated and contain detailed instructions on how to make and use the tools they describe. Readers approached these texts with a desire to extract information – and sometimes even to extract illustrations which could be repurposed as working instruments. To focus on practical approaches to these texts is to bring the category of ‘making’ to the fore. But here care needs to be taken about who could make what, about the rhetoric of craft, and about the technique of working with diagrams and images. I argue that we should read claims about making instruments cautiously, but that, conversely, we should be inquisitive and open-minded when it comes to the potential uses of printed diagrams in acquiring skill and knowledge: these could be worked on directly, or cut out or copied and turned into working instruments. Books were sites of mathematical practice, and in certain disciplines this was central to learning through doing.
Highlights
One of the more surprising things a sixteenth-century owner of an expensive folio volume might do was to take a sharp knife and cut it to pieces
Modern books about mathematical instruments are typically well illustrated and contain detailed instructions on how to make and use the tools they describe. Readers approached these texts with a desire to extract information – and sometimes even to extract illustrations which could be repurposed as working instruments
I argue that we should read claims about making instruments cautiously, but that, we should be inquisitive and open-minded when it comes to the potential uses of printed diagrams in acquiring skill and knowledge: these could be worked on directly, or cut out or copied and turned into working instruments
Summary
John Blagrave’s ‘Jewel’ – which refers both to the book and to the instrument – and Peter Apian’s self-classifying Instrument-Buch (1533) notwithstanding, the genre that I am discussing here requires some explanation. Revealing trade secrets was a part of many addresses to noble patrons, and sure enough Blagrave describes and illustrates a device to perform the most difficult of all engraving tasks: the delineation of extremely shallow curves.[36] Eric Ash has drawn attention to the way in which the minor gentry attempted to position themselves as uniquely placed to mediate between artisans and the patrons of private and state projects, and a book like The Mathematical Jewel was intended to serve just this kind of end.[37]
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