Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome

Between the catastrophic flood of the Tiber River in 1557 and the death of the “engineering pope” Sixtus V in 1590, the city of Rome was transformed by intense activity involving building construction and engineering projects of all kinds. Using hundreds of archival documents and primary sources, Engineering the Eternal City explores the processes and people involved in these infrastructure projects—sewers, bridge repair, flood prevention, aqueduct construction, the building of new, straight streets, and even the relocation of immensely heavy ancient Egyptian obelisks that Roman emperors had carried to the city centuries before. This portrait of an early modern Rome examines the many conflicts, failures, and successes that shaped the city, as decision-makers tried to control not only Rome’s structures and infrastructures but also the people who lived there. Taking up visual images of the city created during the same period—most importantly in maps and urban representations, this book shows how in a time before the development of modern professionalism and modern bureaucracies, there was far more wide-ranging conversation among people of various backgrounds on issues of engineering and infrastructure than there is in our own times. Physicians, civic leaders, jurists, cardinals, popes, and clerics engaged with painters, sculptors, architects, printers, and other practitioners as they discussed, argued, and completed the projects that remade Rome.

History

Long, Pamela O.

Europe

University of Chicago Press

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

The many meanings of obelisks across nearly forty centuries, from Ancient Egypt (which invented them) to twentieth-century America (which put them in Hollywood epics).
Nearly every empire worthy of the name―from ancient Rome to the United States―has sought an Egyptian obelisk to place in the center of a ceremonial space. Obelisks―giant standing stones, invented in Ancient Egypt as sacred objects―serve no practical purpose. For much of their history their inscriptions, in Egyptian hieroglyphics, were completely inscrutable. Yet over the centuries dozens of obelisks have made the voyage from Egypt to Rome, Constantinople, and Florence; to Paris, London, and New York. New obelisks and even obelisk-shaped buildings rose as well―the Washington Monument being a noted example. Obelisks, everyone seems to sense, connote some very special sort of power. This beautifully illustrated book traces the fate and many meanings of obelisks across nearly forty centuries―what they meant to the Egyptians, and how other cultures have borrowed, interpreted, understood, and misunderstood them through the years. In each culture obelisks have taken on new meanings and associations. To the Egyptians, the obelisk was the symbol of a pharaoh's right to rule and connection to the divine. In ancient Rome, obelisks were the embodiment of Rome's coming of age as an empire. To nineteenth-century New Yorkers, the obelisk in Central Park stood for their country's rejection of the trappings of empire just as it was itself beginning to acquire imperial power. And to a twentieth-century reader of Freud, the obelisk had anatomical and psychological connotations. The history of obelisks is a story of technical achievement, imperial conquest, Christian piety and triumphalism, egotism, scholarly brilliance, political hubris, bigoted nationalism, democratic self-assurance, Modernist austerity, and Hollywood kitsch―in short, the story of Western civilization.

Obelisk: A History (Publications of the Burndy Library)

Curran, Brian A.

Weiss, Benjamin

Grafton, Anthony

The MIT Press

Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance

A history of the book and intellectual property that includes military technology and military secrets.
Winner of The Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas
In today's world of intellectual property disputes, industrial espionage, and book signings by famous authors, one easily loses sight of the historical nature of the attribution and ownership of texts. In Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance, Pamela Long combines intellectual history with the history of science and technology to explore the culture of authorship. Using classical Greek as well as medieval and Renaissance European examples, Long traces the definitions, limitations, and traditions of intellectual and scientific creation and attribution. She examines these attitudes as they pertain to the technical and the practical. Although Long's study follows a chronological development, this is not merely a general work. Long is able to examine events and sources within their historical context and locale. By looking at Aristotelian ideas of Praxis, Techne, and Episteme. She explains the tension between craft and ideas, authors and producers. She discusses, with solid research and clear prose, the rise, wane, and resurgence of priority in the crediting and lionizing of authors. Long illuminates the creation and re-creation of ideas like "trade secrets," "plagiarism," "mechanical arts," and "scribal culture." Her historical study complicates prevailing assumptions while inviting a closer look at issues that define so much of our society and thought to this day. She argues that "a useful working definition of authorship permits a gradation of meaning between the poles of authority and originality," and guides us through the term's nuances with clarity rarely matched in a historical study.

Johns Hopkins University Press

This book provides the historical background for a central issue in the history of science: the influence of artisans, craftsmen, and other practitioners on the emergent empirical methodologies that characterized the "new sciences" of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Long offers a coherent account and critical revision of the "Zilsel thesis," an influential etiological narrative which argues that such craftsmen were instrumental in bringing about the "Scientific Revolution." 
Artisan/Practitioners reassesses the issue of artisanal influence from three different perspectives: the perceived relationships between art and nature; the Vitruvian architectural tradition with its appreciation of both theory and practice; and the development of "trading zones"--arenas in which artisans and learned men communicated in substantive ways. These complex social and intellectual developments, the book argues, underlay the development of the empirical sciences. 
This volume provides new discussion and synthesis of a theory that encompasses broad developments in European history and study of the natural world. It will be a valuable resource for college-level teaching, and for scholars and others interested in the history of science, late medieval and early modern European history, and the Scientific Revolution.

Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600 (OSU Press Horning Visiting Scholars Publication)

Oregon State University Press

Artisan

This work presents an overview of technology as intrinsic to the culture of late medieval and Renaissance Europe. It includes discussion of agriculture, textiles such as wool, crafts such as ceramics and leatherwork, painting, architecture, mining and metallurgy, printing, military technology, and clocks. It discusses the details of both traditional and innovative technological processes. It also treats the relationships of technology to labor, class, gender, and other aspects of society. It points to significant historiographic issues and includes a bibliography.

Technology, Society, and Culture in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe, 1300-1600 (SHOT Historical Perspectives on Technology)

American Historical Association

Pamela Long considers the ways in which different medieval cultures, from the Byzantine empire to northern Europe, adopted and transformed technologies according to their own needs. Long introduces readers to recent scholarship and to some of the significant issues in the historiography of medieval technology.

Technology and Society in the Medieval Centuries: Byzantine, Islam, and the West, 500-1300 (SHOT Historical Perspectives on Technology)

Science and technology in medieval society (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences)

Science & Math

Technology

New York Academy of Sciences

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