Based on new research, a distinguished international team studies the forms in which scientific knowledge was transmitted in the late medieval and early modern period, the ways they interacted, and the people to whom the knowledge was directed. Among the famous authors whose work is examined here are Fuchs, Vesalius, Tycho Brahe, and Descartes.

Ian Maclean is a graduate of Oxford, where he also did his doctorate; he was for twenty-four years a Fellow and Praelector in French at Queen's College Oxford, and Lecturer then Reader in Modern Languages in the University of Oxford. He became a titular professor in Renaissance Studies in the University, before moving to All Souls as a Senior Research Fellow in History in 1996. He has held visiting fellowships in Australia, USA, Canada, France, the Netherlands and Germany. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Chevalier des arts et des lettres (France), and a member of the Academia Europaea.

• Introduction


• 1: Sven Dupré: Visualization in Renaissance Optics: The Function of Geometrical Diagrams and Pictures in the Transmission of Practical Knowledge


• 2: Catherine Eagleton: Medieval Sundials and Manuscript Sources: The Transmission of Information about the Navicula and the organum ptolomei in Fifteenth-Century Europe


• 3: Sachiko Kusukawa: The Uses of Pictures in the Formation of Learned Knowledge: The Cases of Leonhard Fuchs and Andreas Vesalius


• 4: Christopher Lüthy: Where Logical Necessity Becomes Visual Persuasion: Descartes's Clear and Distinct Illustrations


• 5: Ian Maclean: Diagrams in the Defence of Galen: Medical Uses of Tables, Squares, Dichotomies, Wheels, and Latitudes, 1480-1574


• 6: Alexander Marr: The Production and Distribution of Mutio Oddi's Dello squadro (1625)


• 7: Adam Mosley: Objects of Knowledge: Mathematics and Models in Sixteenth-Century Cosmology and Astronomy


• 8: Isabelle Pantin: Kepler's Epitome: New Images for an Innovative Book


• 9: Volker R. Remmert: 'Docet parva pictura, quod multae scripturae non dicunt.' Frontispieces, their Functions, and their Audiences in Seventeenth-Century Mathematical Sciences


• Index