Transmitting knowledge: words, images, and instruments in early modern Europe

Abstract

An international team study the forms in which scientific knowledge was transmitted in early modern Europe, the ways they interacted and the people to whom the knowledge was directed. Among the famous writers whose work is considered here are Fuchs, Vesalius, Tycho Brahe, Kepler and Descartes.

Contents

Visualization in renaissance optics : the function of geometrical diagrams and pictures in the transmission of practical knowledge / Sven Dupré -- Medieval sundials and manuscript sources : the transmission of information about the navicula and the Organum Ptolomei in fifteenth-century Europe / Catherine Eagleton -- The uses of pictures in the formation of learned knowledge : the cases of Leonhard Fuchs and Andreas Vesalius / Sachiko Kusukawa -- Where logical necessity becomes visual persuasion : Descartes's clear and distinct illustrations / Christoph Lüthy -- Diagrams in the defence of Galen : medical uses of tables, squares, dichotomies, wheels, and latitudes, 1480-1574 / Ian Maclean -- The production and distribution of Mutio Oddi's Dello squadro (1625) / Alexander Marr -- Objects of knowledge : mathematics and models in sixteenth-century cosmology and astronomy / Adam Mosley -- Kepler's epitome : new images for an innovative book / Isabelle Pantin -- 'Docet parva pictura, quod multae scripturae non dicunt.' Frontispieces, their functions, and their audiences in seventeenth-century mathematical sciences / Volker R. Remmert.