Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600

Foreword

x | Foreword foreword The Thomas Hart and Mary Jones Horning Endowment in the Humanities at Oregon State University was established by a bequest from Benjamin Horning (1890–1991) in memory of his parents, Mary Jones and Thomas Hart Horning, members of pioneering families of Benton County and Corvallis, Oregon. Benjamin Graham Horning graduated from what was then Oregon Agricultural College in 1914, and went on to complete a medical degree at Harvard and a degree in public health from the Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Horning’s long professional career included service in public health in Connecticut, work on rural health as a staff member with the American Public Health Association, and a position as medical director for the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, which led to his spending many years in Latin America. Dr. Horning wanted his bequest at Oregon State University to expand education in the humanities and to build a bridge between the humanities and the sciences. Since 1994, the endowment has supported an annual lecture series and individual lectures, conferences, symposia, and colloquia, as well as teaching, research, and program and collection development. The Horning professorships are housed in the Department of History. The first Thomas Hart and Mary Jones Horning Professors in the Humanities, Mary Jo Nye and Robert A. Nye, were appointed in 1994. Anita Guerrini and David A. Luft succeeded them in 2008. The Horning Visiting Scholar in the Humanities program was inaugurated in 2006 to allow a distinguished scholar to spend a week in residence at OSU and deliver a series of lectures as well as participate in other activities in and out of the classroom. Visiting Scholars since 2006 have included Ken Alder (Northwestern University), Liba Taub (Cambridge University), Lawrence Principe (Johns Hopkins University), and John Beatty (University of British Columbia). The OSU Press Horning Visiting Scholars Publication Series, under the direction of the Press’s acquisitions editor, Mary Elizabeth Braun, publishes the public lectures delivered by the Horning Visiting Scholar: one volume in the series has appeared, Liba Taub’s Aetna and the Moon (2008). Other works in the humanities outside the scope of this series that the series editors, Anita Guerrini and David Luft, have found to be relevant to the aims of the Horning Endowment may also be published by the Press in the future. Foreword | xi Pamela O. Long was the Horning Visiting Scholar in April 2010. Dr. Long is an independent scholar of late medieval and Renaissance science and technology based in Washington, D.C. Her research and scholarship have focused particularly on craft traditions, authorship, the intersections of architecture and science, and the history of engineering. Dr. Long’s scholarship has ranged across Europe, with a recent focus on the city of Rome. Her many publications include Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (2001), which won the 2001 Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the best book in intellectual history, awarded by the Journal of the History of Ideas; Obelisk: A History (with Brian Curran, Anthony Grafton, and Benjamin Weiss, 2009); and the three-volume Book of Michael of Rhodes: A FifteenthCentury Maritime Manuscript (2009), co-edited and co-authored with David McGee and Alan M. Stahl. She co-edits, with Robert C. Post, the booklet series Historical Perspectives on Technology, Society and Culture, co-sponsored by the American Historical Association and the Society for the History of Technology. In Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400–1600, Pamela Long offers a concise and compelling account of the roles of artisans and practitioners in the development of the new sciences of the early modern era. Most accounts of the “scientific revolution” have emphasized elite academic naturalphilosophers,andtheroleplayedbycraftspeoplehasbeenhotlycontested among historians. Intriguingly, Dr. Long begins her book with a reassessment of earlier historiographical accounts of this issue, focusing particularly on the Marxist philosopher Edgar Zilsel (1891–1944). Subsequent chapters draw on Dr. Long’s deep knowledge of learned and craft traditions to argue that, in fact, these traditions found increasingly common ground over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to create the empirically based new sciences. The humanist revival of the works of the ancient Roman architectural scholar Vitruvius, for example, led engineers, craftsmen, and scholars to collaborate in construction and engineering projects. Dr. Long effectively employs the concept of “trading zones” (developed by the historian of science Peter Galison to talk about modern physics) to talk about places ranging from mines to cities where interchanges...