The institutional and historiographical trajectory of the Institute and Museum of the History of Science in Florence is examined through the foundational work of its first two directors, Andrea Corsini and Maria Luisa Bonelli. The analysis highlights how the Florentine institution developed a unique “anomaly” within the Italian landscape, pioneering a methodological shift that elevated scientific instruments and material culture to the status of legitimate historical documents. Utilizing unpublished archival materials, the paper illustrates how Corsini’s institutional vision and Bonelli’s expertise successfully established the history of science as an autonomous discipline grounded in its physical artifacts.
This article analyses six handbooks of water management written by publicly employed hydraulic officials in Augsburg, Barcelona, Bologna, Florence, Naples, and Rouen in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. So far studied primarily from a local perspective, each of these handbooks has often been described as an exceptional source. By comparing them here for the first time, we argue instead that they formed an emerging genre in early modern Europe. This genre aimed at achieving status for author and discipline alike: by claiming a degree of specialisation and expertise, the hydraulic officials who wrote these six handbooks also claimed a degree of specialisation for their field, water management. We argue that the genre of early modern handbooks of water management has been overlooked in the historiography, and that a focus on it is useful to understand the emergence of increasingly specialised hydraulic experts and their body of knowledge about waters in early modern Europe.
This paper examines an unpublished manual of practical mathematics, the Libro di ragione (MS Baldovinetti 229), written in 1461 by the Florentine Matteo Cerretani (1444–1519). Based on a comparative analysis with earlier and later abacus manuscripts, this paper argues that such texts were not passive repositories of techniques, but active sites of knowledge production. Cerretani’s manual emerges as the result of processes of selection and reorganization of clusters of mathematical problems – the so-called ragioni – drawn from other Tuscan sources and closely tied to commercial practice. Far from being an isolated case, this mode of compilation reflects a broader pattern of knowledge-making within the abacus tradition, one of the main channels through which practical mathematics circulated in late medieval and early modern Europe. Finally, archival evidence further allows us to reconstruct Cerretani’s social and cultural networks, shedding light on the milieu in which such knowledge was shaped, transmitted, and used.
The camera obscura is best known to historians of science and historians of philosophy for its role in early theories of human vision and cognition. Art historians have discussed the instrument mostly as a predecessor to the photographic camera. Building on recent literature that combines these strands of scholarship, I argue that the codification and circulation of the main philosophical and artistic problems of the camera were more closely intertwined than previously believed. I show that, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, discussions of the setup of the camera obscura as a painting tool and of the conceptualization of its optical projection often coincided. For both, finding the distances between the lens, object, and image was a persistent problem until mathematicians provided explicit solutions, around 1700. Therefore, I argue, the conceptualization of these distances in projection and the codification of the camera obscura’s material use for painting were inextricably linked.
This article examines how practical mathematical knowledge was shaped through interactions between abbaco mathematicians and other expert practitioners in early sixteenth-century Verona. During the 1520s and 1530s, the Veronese abbaco masters, Francesco Feliciano and Niccolò Tartaglia both taught practical mathematics, undertook consultancy, and developed successful printed works while working in the city. Through comparing their practices, publications, and professional networks, I argue that the differing communities they engaged with shaped not only the problems they addressed, but also the values they promoted. Feliciano’s surveying activities fostered process-based forms of knowledge directed toward reliability, fairness, and practical competency, while Tartaglia’s engagement with military practitioners encouraged ambitious approaches to motion and theory, with a focus on ingenuity and innovation. Their frontispieces similarly show both a shared image of mathematical expertise and a divergent reach in epistemic ambition. In this way, I show that exchange across professional worlds was not incidental, but integral to the production of abbaco knowledge.
