TECHNOLOGYAND CULTURE Book Reviews 899 tension-resisting members. Courtenay discusses these at length and follows their murky but plausible dissemination in Early Christian churches and in the DarkAges and Carolingian eras. Romanesque roofs may preserve Roman memories, with their rows of identical tied trusses, without ridge beams or any transverse bracing other than the batten boards supporting the cladding. The Scandinavian development of lateral bracing and division into bays with principal and common rafters remains somewhat enigmatic in this account, as does their influence on Gothic timber frames. Courtenay’s summary of her research, in collabo ration with Mark, on the great hammer beam truss by Hugh Herland at Westminster Hall in London, is the climax of this chapter. Renaissance innovations are the fully triangulated trusses ofVasari and Palladio, and Philibert de l’Orme’s laminated wooden arches, both executed and published by the new Renaissance breed of scholar-practitioners. Com pared to these, Wren’s famous tied frame for the Sheldonian Theater in Oxford is anachronistic, despite its unusual span and metal-fastened scarfjoints. The book, despite minor errors and omissions, is a very useful reference, summarizing much scholarship on historical structures. With some guidance, it could be a fine secondary textbook in a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses. Sergio L. Sanabria Dr. Sanabria teaches in the Department ofArchitecture at Miami University. Vanguard ofEmpire: Ships ofExploration in theAge ofColumbus. By Roger C. Smith. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1993. Pp. xii+316; illustra tions, notes, appendixes, bibliography, indexes. $35.00. When one considers the history of technology, few inventions stand out as dramatically and significantly as the seagoing ship. Roger Smith’s Vanguard ofEmpire attempts to provide “an up to date perspective of the ways in which Iberian vessels of exploration were built, manned, armed, and provisioned” (p. vii). Although this objective has been sought before, Smith’s approach attempts to make greater use of newly discovered historical documents and the results of recent archaeological excavations of discovery-period shipwreck sites. Following a brief introduction in which the political, religious, economic, and cultural conditions leading up to the European Age of Discovery are cursorily reviewed, Smith identifies the Iberian maritime states of Spain and Portugal as the center of a nautical renaissance in oceangoing technology in the years between 1430 and 1530, and the caravel and the nao as the ship types most favored by the explorers. He then oudines the probable origins of these two vessel types and describes their general characteristics. The majority of the book is devoted to step-by-step descriptions of building caravels and naos and 900 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGYAND CULTURE equipping them for exploratory voyaging. Throughout the narrative Smith includes the Spanish or Portuguese equivalent for virtually every nautical term mentioned. Originally Smith’s Ph.D. dissertation for the Department of History at Texas A&M University, Vanguard ofEmpireis the latest addition to a voluminous body of literature on European nautical technology in the 15th and 16th centuries. Much of the book is used to review and recapitulate this earlier literature and set the stage for new revelations in document research and shipwreck archaeology. Preeminent among the newly discovered documents is an inventory of equipment on board the caravel Santa Clara (Columbus’s Nina) in 1498. Discovered by Dr. Eugene Lyon, the document is reproduced in facsimile in appendix D and translated and annotated by Denise Lakey. Among other surprises, the document appears to indicate that Nina carried four masts, not three, as historians have always presumed. The reader may be somewhat disappointed in the results of recent archaeo logical research: all but three of the sites explored had been salvaged or dredged before archaeologists arrived on the scene, and not one of them can be positively identified as a caravel or nao. The archaeological findings seem to be ambiguous, even contradictory, and one gets the impression that it is still too early to learn much from this quarter. Vanguard's main concern is the ships themselves—the technological vectors for geographic exploration. It makes the point that the seagoing ship resulted from the purposeful combining of several technologies that already existed. The effect of this on European culture is imparted subliminally throughout the descriptions...
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Feb 1, 1998
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