Das Gewicht der Dinge. Quantifizierung der Materie und der Transfer technischen und gelehrten Wissens in der Frühen Neuzeit.
Frühneuzeitliche Geschichte
Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse
This project investigated the notion of specific gravity in the early modern period. The project shifted away from examining this topic as a conventional disciplinary subject in the history of chemistry and the physical sciences. Instead, we drew attention to a rich context of early modern experts, including instrument makers and military engineers, antiquarians and humanists, and alchemists. In this way, the project concentrated on the exchange of technical and learned knowledge at the origin of early modern European empiricism. One of the major accomplishments of the project was revealing the unexpected part played by antiquarianism in an experimental context. The research identified a substantially unexplored tradition of antiquarians and humanists who produced measures of specific gravities while working on determining the equivalence between ancient Roman, Greek and Hebrew measures and contemporary measurement units. This research sheds light on a novel, interdisciplinary perspective on the origins of early modern experimentalism, with contributions to empiricism derived from the early modern humanities. Specific gravities also played a significant and overlooked role in the mathematical instruments developed by practical mathematicians, instrument makers, and military engineers. Sectors and gunner’s gauges are the two major types of these instruments. The project created a catalogue of these instruments from the Mathematisch Physikalischer Salon in Dresden and the Deutsches Museum in Munich, accompanied by an analysis of their scales. Aside from the well-known Compasso Geometrico e Militare of Galileo Galilei, the project identified a large group of sectors, constructed between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, that employed scales based on specific gravities. Work on gunner’s gauges especially focused on the figures of Georg Hartmann and Niccolò Tartaglia. Georg Hartmann, a celebrated Nuremberg scholar and instrument maker, constructed the first gunner’s gauges in his workshop in the 1540s. The Italian mathematician Niccolò Tartaglia also gave a theoretical description of a tool with the functions of a gunner’s gauge. During this research, the project uncovered the earliest surviving specimen of a gunner’s gauge in the world and the only extant exemplar of the gunner’s gauges produced in the workshop of Georg Hartmann (now preserved in Bamberg, at the Bamberg Historischer Verein). Finally, research on alchemists and metallurgists like Français Foix de Candale, Gaston DuClo, Lazarus Ercker and their followers shows that, in the sixteenth century and after, many authors commonly employed volumetric measures for the determination of specific gravities. This find is original and proves the existence of an early experimental tradition alternative to the well-known one of authors employing Archimedean hydrostatic procedures.
Projektbezogene Publikationen (Auswahl)
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Beyond recipes: The Baconian natural and experimental histories as an epistemic genre. Centaurus, 62(3), 447-464.
Pastorino, Cesare
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Exploration and Experimentation on the Weight and Density of Substances in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries: Introduction. Early Science and Medicine, 25(4), 297-301.
Pastorino, Cesare
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Exploring and Experimenting on the Weight and Density of Things in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries. Special issue of Early Science and Medicine, 25 (4).
Pastorino, Cesare
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Johannes Kepler and the Exploration of the Weight of Substances in the Long Sixteenth Century. Early Science and Medicine, 25(4), 328-359.
Pastorino, Cesare
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The Early Modern Study of Ancient Measures in Comparative Perspective. The Worlds of Knowledge and the Classical Tradition in the Early Modern Age, 118-141. BRILL.
Pastorino, Cesare
