Cultures of mathematics: instruments, astraria and clocks between practical and theoretical mathematics at the eve of the modern age of Europe
Team
Period
2021-2026
Funding
Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (2020.02581.CEECIND)
Mathematical and astronomical instruments played a crucial role in early modern practice of science. They would serve the various practitioners not only in calculating, scaling, recording, and measuring but equally in teaching and symbolizing knowledge. Hence historians of science increasingly focus on knowledge embodied in the material tools, and the practitioners’ specific mathematical culture to develop them. The historiography faces several challenges:
- Most studies have concentrated on the successful instruments, but neglected the failed ones.
- They have disproportionally looked at Italian and English contexts while connections throughout the Christian world, particularly between the Low Countries and Iberia, and even to the Ottoman Empire were strong.
- Finally, many accounts fail to consider the cultural markers patent on materially preserved historical instruments, neglecting them as primary sources in their research as a complement to textual documents.
This project “Cultures of Mathematics” addresses these three gaps by (re)assessing understudied sources: instruments and instrument texts from Portuguese archives and collections, and thereby constructing a more differentiated picture about the mathematical cultures they emerged from.
A combination of methods from cultural studies, philology and manuscript study together with a newly designed approach for thick description and interpretation of preserved instruments, gauges, standards and mechanisms will bring to the light the underlying mathematical cultures.
This allows then for a comparative study of geographically and socio-culturally distinct locales. Understanding the complex role of mathematical instruments used by the practitioners in the Iberian space will clarify the early modern transformation of a mathematical ‘outlook’ and reveal scientific exchange across Europe and the Mediterranean world.