[exercise 3 – tips and resources]

Primary sources:

• Besson, Jacques. Theatrum instrumentorum et machinarum… (1578)
• Konrad Kyeser. Bellifortis (1460)
• Ramelli’s drawings of machines
• Vitruvius. “Book 10” in the Ten Books of Architecture. Translated by Morris Hicky Morgan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1914.

Secondary sources:

• [automata] Bedini, Silvio A., “The Role of Automata in the History of Technology,” Technology and Culture, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Winter, 1964), pp. 24-42.
• [automata] Kang, Minsoo, “Wonders of Mathematical Magic: Lists of Automata in the Transition from Magic to Science, 1533-1662,” Comitatus, Vol. 33 (2002), 113-139.
• [automata] Mayr, Otto, “The Mechanical Clock, Its Makers and Users,” in Authority, Liberty & Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe, Baltimore: the Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986, pp. 3-27.
• [automata] Price, Derek J. de Solla, “Automata and the Origins of Mechanism and Mechanistic Philosophy,” Technology and Culture, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Winter, 1964), pp. 9-23.
• [automata] Price, Derek J. de Solla, “On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices and the Compass,” Contributions from the Museum of History and Technology, Bulletin 218, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1959, pp. 82-112.
• [automata] Riskin, Jessica, Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2007 (especially chapters 2 & 3).
• [automata] Sherwood, Merriam, “Magic and Mechanics in Medieval Fiction,” Studies in Philology, Vol. XLIV, No. 4 (Oct., 1947), pp. 567-592.
• [automata] Tybjerg, Karin, “Wonder-making and philosophical wonder in Hero of Alexandria,” Studies In History and Philosophy of Science Part A, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Sep., 2003), Pages 443-466.
• [Leonardo] Leonardo’s Machines: Secrets and Inventions in the Da Vinci Codices, Firenze: Giunti, 2005. [please bear in mind that these are interpretations of Leonardo’s sketches]
• [Leonardo] Rosheim, Mark Elling, Leonardo’s Lost Robots, New York: Springer Verlag, 2006.
• [machines] Lefevre, Wolfgang, ed., Picturing Machines 1400-1700, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
• [machines] Lefevre, Wolfgang, Jurgen Renn, and Urs Schoepflin, eds., the Power of Images in Early Modern Science, Boston, MA: Birkhauser Verlag, 2003.
• [machines] Sawday, Jonathan, Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine, New York: Routledge, 2007.
• [zodiac man] Garin, Eugenio. Astrology in the Renaissance: The Zodiac of Life. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983.
• [zodiac man] Page, Sophie. Astrology in Medieval Manuscripts. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.

Suggested websites:

• [Leonardo] Museo di Leonardo da Vinci; especially the section on his machine designs
• [Leonardo] Exhibition Leonardo da Vinci’s workshop
• [machines] On Jacques Besson’s Theatrum instrumentorum et machinarum… (1578)
• [machines] Online source with Ramelli’s drawings of machines
• [machines] Youtube video of construction machines of the Renaissance
• [war machines/instruments] Exhibition the Geometry of War, 1500-1750 at the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford
• [zodiac man] Online source with images of the zodiac man

Just for fun (and well beyond the period covered by the course):

• You might be interested in taking a peek at the website of the Steampunk exhibition, if only to see how some contemporary artists have taken their inspiration from history (in this case, from the Victorian era). You can see the pieces up close in this video, or the machines in action in this one.