"Geometria Deutsch". Printed Books on Practical Geometry up to around 1600

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Christina Lechtermann
• Subject Area: German Medieval Studies (Medieval German Literature)
• Term: from 2017 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 381793985

Printed works of practical geometry present themselves as part of a network of different practices. They reflect on themselves as texts and images which only start to constitute meaning when brought into close interaction with other objects (e.g. compasses and ruler, measuring stick). Again and again they seem to rely on their recipients to bring together text, diagram, geometrical instrument and practice, or to be more precise: they claim (and sometimes boast) to work only this way. Art History as well as the History of Science and Media History have used these texts as sources, but the books themselves, their design, their textual form and their rhetoric was hardly analysed systematically. Where it has been examined at all, it was the educational intention that has been considered a priori as the main goal of textual strategies and book-design. A more detailed exploration of the books, however, shows quite heterogeneous results: the practicability claimed by the preambles is answered in very varying ways within the books. Overexplicit or unintelligibly truncated, the books combine an economy of presentation on the one hand with seemingly superfluous addenda on the other. The selection of "canonical" procedures and instruments follow craftsmanship as well as certain textual traditions. Furthermore, some of the writings seem to answer no less to the requirements of courtly representation than to those of artisanry, others answer to the premises of urban humanistic communication or to the needs to advocate the mastery of a printers shop or they ascribe a certain realm of knowledge to an author, editor or presentee. In short: we can hypothesise that the particular Gestalt of these books, their multiple addressing, their different ways to take up a tradition and to establish their own, and not the least their varying ways to transliterate knowledge about this and to transliterate the know-how points towards a polyfunctionality that has been hidden and masked in scholarly literature by terms like "specialists literature" or "educational book". Thus, scholarship has up to now evened out and thereby ignored especially those elements that indicate a specific and often ostentatiously staged aesthetic of the books on geometria practica.The project will therefore aim to prove the hypothesis that in the vernacular literature on geometry, there is an interlacement of their didactic function (their eagerness to communicate "how to" do geometry), and their "geometrical" poetic and aesthetic design, that is adaptable to many different agendas of communication. A comparative analysis of the German print works on constructive geometry and on surveying geometry will focus on both aspects.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants