In the late sixteenth century a number of mathematicians tried to introduce geometrical methods into surveying practice, to be based on simplified astronomical instruments, angle measurement, and triangulation. A measure of success is indicated by the acceptance of the simple theodolite, but the surveyors resisted such complex instruments as the altazimuth theodolite, recipiangle, and trigonometer. Counter-proposals, in particular the plane table, threatened to undermine the geometrical programme, but by the mid-seventeenth century a stable compromise had evolved. Among other things, the (...) demise of the shadow square indicates that angle measurement was then part of surveying practice. (shrink)

SummaryIn the formative period of London's scientific instrument industry membership of a guild was a necessary step towards owning a business in the City. Through the guilds' formal system of apprenticeship, boys received first-class training in a skilled trade, and learned essential marketing and managerial techniques. By analysing the guilds' records of apprenticeship and subsequent guild life it is possible to determine chains of masters and apprentices by which the knowledge passed from generation to generation. At the same time, dates (...) can be established for the training and subsequent working life of many known makers. The chains of knowledge reveal new and often important masters who were previously unknown because, by chance, their instruments or advertisements have not survived to the present day. Two guilds have been used to illustrate the chains: Broderers' Company and Joiners' Company. (shrink)

In considering the appropriate use of the terms “science” and “scientific instrument,” tracing the history of “mathematical instruments” in the early modern period is offered as an illuminating alternative to the historian's natural instinct to follow the guiding lights of originality and innovation, even if the trail transgresses contemporary boundaries. The mathematical instrument was a well-defined category, shared across the academic, artisanal, and commercial aspects of instrumentation, and its narrative from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century was largely independent from (...) other classes of device, in a period when a “scientific” instrument was unheard of. (shrink)

This article has three main goals. Firstly, it intends to present the interesting but little-studied intellectual figure of Sir Francis Kynaston , his educational enterprises, and his contributions to 17th-century English culture. Secondly, it aims to illustrate in detail his often neglected or, at best, misunderstood political ideas and connect them to the type of debates and controversies he was involved in at the end of the 1620s. In doing so, one of the principal objectives will be to revisit the (...) traditional scholarly interpretations of Kynaston's place within the history of political thought in early modern England. In particular, attention will be paid to the language Kynaston employed to attack a specific political paradigm, that is parliamentarian “patriotism”. Finally, the essay will endeavour to show the interplay between Kynaston's educational project and cultural ideals, on one side, and his absolutist political doctrines and goals, on the other. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The English Polydaedali:How Gabriel Harvey Read Late Tudor LondonNicholas PopperHarvey and GauricoIn 1590 Gabriel Harvey read his copy of Luca Gaurico's 1552 Tractatus Astrologicus, a collection of genitures and commentaries for cities and individuals.1 Harvey had spent the previous twenty-five years at Oxford and Cambridge, mastering Greek and Latin, earning renown as a rhetorician, and promoting English letters. He was a well-known partisan of the French Calvinist Peter Ramus, (...) whose works on curriculum reform had sparked vicious [End Page 351] controversies in the English universities. But Harvey read Gaurico far removed from the schools where he had acquired fame and notoriety as an orator and poet. He had recently relocated to London, where he daily faced a dense, active city unlike his native Saffron Walden and the university towns. Nevertheless he read as he always had, carefully recording his reactions in the margins of the printed text, filling blank spaces with his own commentaries on the subjects presented by Gaurico. The notes disclose an experience of reading that intervened in contemporary debates regarding technology, astrology and utility.2 They also place Harvey among a group of scholars in London in the 1590s, such as Francis Bacon and Hugh Plat, who were examining the benefits local artisans might offer the commonwealth and reconsidering the intellectual status of craft knowledge.Harvey read and annotated Gaurico on several occasions, but the particular strain of notes that I will follow, united by a common ink and hand, engages the learning and erudition of Gaurico's subjects.3 Concentrated almost [End Page 352] exclusively in Book Four, which discussed learned men, these annotations evaluate the poets, philosophers, philologists, and others whom Gaurico had canonized as especially learned.There are only spare annotations prior to Book Four. On the title page of Book Two, devoted to churchmen, Harvey observes the quality of the individuals Gaurico presented and details his own method of evaluation:The most excellent Exemplars of this century [are] in Gaurico, and Cardano: Giovio, and Guiccardini. There are as many of the wisest men as of the greatest actors. Still others live, whether inferior, equal, or superior. And it is of interest to every skillful artificer, to know those most outstanding in their class, and the most celebrated professors of all. Certainly it is very profitable to observe exquisitely the most perfect artificers either of the world or of neighboring nations, or at least of your own people, and to consider with most cunning reason what it is, where it comes from, and what is most excellent. But seriously, and solidly, and always to the point, seeing that singular things are efficacious and are useful to polytechnoscopy. It is judicious to avoid all trivial detail, and to consider only the most pregnant theorists and practitioners of operating.4The notion of a sophisticated form of active knowledge labeled "polytechnoscopy" is the most striking element of this passage. This term seems to have been Harvey's own invention, with no direct precedents; nor was it adopted or used by others after him.Harvey repeatedly referred to polytechnoscopy in his notes. A carefully designed triptych annotation on the title page of Book Four clarifies it as a category uniting practice and knowledge. To the left Harvey wrote, "it is my task to observe the most excellent examples of this age which are useful for polytechnoscopy." On the right, "a polytechnic, polymechanic, polydaedalic, and almost panepistemic book; and likewise sufficiently polychristian. For philologists should be skimmed through; while polytechnics should be examined closely; as I did not only in the Lives of Giovio, but also in those of [End Page 353] Laertius, Eunapius, Philostratus, and others."5 The related Greek descriptors "polymechanic" and "polydaedalic" shed further light on polytechnoscopy. This constellation of terms refers to a method of garnering information by deploying technical knowledge. While not a systematic discipline, its practices—active applicability, craft expertise, observation of experience—constitute a significant realm of learning.In the central panel of the triptych, Harvey notes:[I] compared [this] to Giovio's Elegies of Learned Men. Give me the best man outdoors, and his image at home. For even true life is... (shrink)

Among the many engravings of landscapes, buildings, portraits and other illustrations produced by the seventeenth-century artist Wenceslaus Hollar, there are a small number of images of contemporary men of science. Of particular interest is the portrait of the instrument-maker Elias Allen, both because portraits of men of his social status were extremely uncommon at this time, and also because the cluttered mass of instruments shown in the image presents a picture wholly unlike other portraits of the period. The first part (...) of this paper explores the position of portraiture as inherently linked to nobility, and seeks to present an explanation as to why the original oil painting of Allen might have been made. The second part looks at the image itself, and discusses possible reasons for Hollar's production of the engraving some twenty years after the original. (shrink)

This paper examines the discrepancy between the attitudes of many historians of mathematics to sixteenth-century geometry and those of museum curators and others interested in practical mathematics and in instruments. It argues for the need to treat past mathematical practice, not in relation to timeless criteria of mathematical worth, but according to the agenda of the period. Three examples of geometrical activity are used to illustrate this, and two particular contexts are presented in which mathematical practice localised in the sixteenth (...) century takes on a special historical significance. (shrink)

Summary A new culture of mathematics was developed in sixteenth-century England, the culture of ?the mathematicalls?. Its representatives were the self-styled mathematical practitioners who presented their art as a practical and worldly activity. The careers of two practitioners, Thomas Bedwell and Thomas Hood, are used as case studies to examine the establishment of this culture of the mathematicalls. Both practitioners self-consciously used mathematical instruments as key resources in negotiating their own roles. Bedwell defined his role in contrast to mechanicians and (...) he secured patronage in military engineering and the service of the commonwealth; Hood worked in the commercial setting of London as a teacher, author, chartmaker, and retailer. Working in new contexts and dealing with new audiences of gentlemen and mechanicians, Bedwell and Hood used instruments to construct a public consensus on the status and aims of mathematics. (shrink)

Until the first quarter of the seventeenth century there was a great deal of agreement about the nature of mathematical practice. Mathematicians, as well as their patrons and clients, viewed all possible aspects of their work, both theoretical and practical, as being included within their discipline. Although the mathematical sciences were a fairly recent foreign import to England, which can barely be traced back beyond the mid-sixteenth century, by the beginning of the seventeenth century there was a large and growing (...) body of practitioners with a unified view of their subject's identity. Divisions began to appear, however, and they were often framed in terms of the proper mixture of theory and practice in mathematical education.One early sign of the emergence of this tension is the kind of accusation made in the priority dispute between William Oughtred and Richard Delamain taking place around 1632. Their bitter conflict began over who first invented the Horizontal Quadrant, a form of sundial, and the Circles of Proportion, a logarithmic calculating device that can be considered a precursor of the slide rule, and ended in a dispute over what constituted proper mathematical practice. Oughtred accused Delamain of making his students ‘only doers of tricks, and as it were Juglers’ by teaching them the use of instruments without any theoretical foundation. Instruments, Oughtred claimed, could only be used with understanding by students who had a proper theoretical foundation. He advocated postponing their use until after the theoretical foundations of a subject had been thoroughly mastered. Delamain, on the other hand, was perfectly willing to teach practical instrumental operations without insisting upon a theoretical grounding. This paper will use the dispute between Oughtred and Delamain to investigate the breakdown of consensus over internal mathematical boundaries, the rhetoric and strategies involved in attempts to gain authority by mathematical practitioners, and the extent to which their roles were negotiated, both with other practitioners, and with their patrons and students. (shrink)