JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Society for the History of Technology and The Johns Hopkins University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Technology and Culture.The expansion of mathematical and technical literature during the 15th and 16th centuries, often through the patronage of Italian princes and ecclesiastics,' is only one aspect of a many-sided relationship between European courts, technology, and science. A deeper understanding of aristocratic involvement in technology and science may be attained by developing a picture of a specific princely type-one who not only patronizes technical and mathematical projects, but who is himself a technical and mathematical practitioner. The study of prince-practitioners in Germany will serve to illustrate the function of several European courts as institutional nodes of technical activity. I suggest that such courts, by tailoring technical and scientific roles to the special projects of princes; by emphasizing the procedural values of technical precision, exact and critical observation and the organized collection of information; and by promoting collaborative efforts through informal routes of communication added aristocratic support and authority to the development of important features of the experimental approach to the study of nature.The influence of the court in the development of new technologies and in the creation of procedures useful to science has so far gained only peripheral attention. This discussion; while in no way attempting to limit the authority of Bacon's philosophy in the establishment of the experimental method nor favoring a particular explanation of the origin of Baconian principles, seeks at least to widen the social context
This chapter focuses upon the relation between textual and social practices that influenced the formation of a communal approach to acquiring chemical knowledge in the early seventeenth century. It also describes the utilitarian purpose of a humanist-inspired program of chemical learning that blended practices of textual/linguistic expertise and artisanal know-how. Humanism, made pragmatic, sought to define the principles for "making things well." In the design of Andreas Libavius (ca. 1555-1616), interpretive intuitions resulting from practiced reading of ancient and medieval texts combined with a knowledge of workshop language to build consensus about chymia's tools, procedures, and materials and to define its principia artificialia.
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