Elizabethan Instrument Makers: The Origins of the London Trade in Precision Instrument Makers (review)

Elizabethan Instrument Makers: The Origins of the London Trade in Precision Instrument Makers. By Gerard L'E. Turner. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. xiv+305. $135.

Changes in land ownership and use in England in the sixteenth century, the expansion of deepwater sailing and overseas trade, and an almost constant state of warfare led to an increased demand for practical mathematics and mathematical practitioners. These factors also led to the rise of craftsmen who could produce the mathematical instruments needed for surveying, navigation, and gunnery. In Elizabethan Instrument Makers, Gerard Turner identifies ten instrument makers who worked in London during the period 1540-1610 and analyzes the surviving snippets of information about the five most important ones—Thomas Gemini (who came from the Low Countries), Humfrey Cole, James Kynvyn, Augustine Ryther, and Charles Whitwell—as well as Elias Allen, who carried the Elizabethan tradition into the early seventeenth century. Recognizing that these men were engravers whose skill might be put to various purposes, Turner provides a list of images (maps, playing cards, and book illustrations) printed from plates that they cut.

The longest section of the book is a detailed catalog of 103 instruments attributed to the Elizabethan makers by signature or other means. This includes descriptions, illustrations, and sizes, along with information about provenance, literature, and location. Turner pays special attention to such features of each instrument as the quality of engraving, the style of decoration, and the range of data, and argues that these features are characteristic of the maker or his workshop. This may make dull reading, but it is intended to enable the reader to become a practitioner of what Turner calls the "forensic" method of instrument analysis.

For those unfamiliar with mathematical instruments, Turner provides an intelligent discussion of the four main types: the compendium, the folding rule, the sector, and the theodolite. He also discusses Robert Dudley, the "base son" of the Earl of Leicester, who amassed what is believed to be the finest collection of sixteenth-century English instruments. Turner himself discovered nineteen of Dudley's instruments in the Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence.