This book offers a comprehensive study and account of the co-evolution
of technological and scientific literature in the early modern period
(1450-1750). It examines the various relationships of these literatures
in six areas of knowledge - Architecture, Chemistry, Gunnery, Mechanical
Engineering, Mining, and Practical Mathematics - which represent the
main types of advanced technological and scientific knowledge of the
era. These six fields of technologically advanced knowledge and their
interrelations and interactions with learned knowledge are investigated
and discussed through a specific lens: by focusing on the technological
literature.
Among present-day historians of science, it hardly remains controversial
that contact and exchange between educated and practical knowledge
played a significant role in the development of the natural sciences and
technology in early modern Europe. Several paths for such exchange arose
from the late Middle Ages onward due to the formation of an economy of
knowledge that fostered contacts and exchange between the two worlds.
How can this development be adequately described and how, on the basis
of such a description, can the significance of this process for the
early modern history of knowledge in the West be assessed? These are the
overarching questions this book tries to answer.
There exists a considerable amount of literature concerning several
stations and events in the course of this long development process as
well as its various aspects. As meritorious and indispensable as many of
these studies are, none of them tried to portray this process as a whole
with its most essential branches. What is more, many of them implicitly
or explicitly took physics as a model of science, and thus highlighted
mechanics and mechanical engineering as the model of all interrelations
of practical and learned knowledge. By contrast, this book aims at a
more complete portrait of the early modern interrelations and
interactions between learned and practical knowledge. It tries to convey
a new idea of the variety and disunity of these relations by discussing
and comparing altogether six widely different fields of knowledge and
practice.
The targeted audience of this book is first of all the historians of
science and technology. As one of the peer reviewers suggested - the
book could very well become a textbook used for teaching the history of
science and technology at universities. Furthermore, since the book
addresses fundamental aspects of the significance emergence and
development of modern science has for the self-image of the West, it can
be expected that it will attract the attention and interest of a wider
readership than professional historians.
