Early Science and Medicine最新文献

This essay offers a new reading of Galileo’s most celebrated anagram, incorporating both the prehistory of his late-1610 disclosure concerning the moon-like phases of Venus, and the awkward “leftover letters,” o and y, of the eventual cypher. It argues for a sustained analogy between components of the optical instrument, musical instruments, and particular anatomical structures described by Galen and elaborated by early modern anatomists in Padua. It proposes, finally, the cypher as a calculated response to the Neapolitan magus and playwright Giambattista della Porta’s challenge to Galileo’s claims about the telescope itself.

In sixteenth-century Lisbon, Aires Vaz and Manuel Rodrigues were summoned to the Inquisition on account of their astrological practices. Records of the trial of Vaz and Rodrigues provide valuable information regarding the training and practice of an astrologer in sixteenth-century Portugal. Prior to this study, however, our knowledge on these matters was scarce and mostly indirect. In this article, we argue that the study of these trial records is crucial to understanding both the practice and the regulation of astrology. Studies on the censorship of astrology usually emphasize the importance of the Roman Index, the Tridentine Rules, and the papal bulls against astrology. By looking at these two trials, this article sheds new light on the application of the Roman rules and allows us to trace the general profile of an astrologer in early modern Portugal.

Two Latin manuscripts in Oxford and Florence preserve diverging recensions of a previously unnoticed astronomical treatise beginning Infra signiferi poli regionem (Oxford recension) or Circulorum alius est sub quo (Florence recension). It can be shown that this anonymous text was originally intended to accompany the Tables of Marseilles in Raymond of Marseilles’s twelfth-century Liber cursuum planetarum (ca. 1141). While the core tables for planetary longitudes in this set were founded on Ptolemy’s kinematic models, as known from the Almagest, this new source frequently deviates from the Ptolemaic norm, for instance by explicitly rejecting an epicyclic explanation of planetary stations and retrogradations. In place of the latter, it argues in favour of a heliodynamic theory inspired by Roman sources such as Pliny, which underwent certain developments in the works of twelfth-century Latin writers such as William of Conches. Rather than being wholly exceptional, these features are indicative of a degree of disconnect between planetary theory and computational practice in twelfth-century Latin astronomy, which is also detectable in other sources from this period.

The article sheds light on the invention of early modern precision instruments and their application in medicine, by analysing a neglected work by one of the Italian pupils of the physician Santorio Santori (1561–1636). This source provides vital information on Santorio’s experimental sample, and on the practical use and dimensions of instruments such as thermometers, hygrometers, pulsimeters and precision scales, showing that they also had a normative purpose: regulating the environmental factors affecting human health. The article first establishes the derivative nature of the source from Santorio’s teachings, and then contextualises the invention of precision instruments with regard to Santorio’s published and unpublished output. In the conclusions, I argue that the new instruments were meant to address the shortcomings of the traditional diagnostic rationale and are best conceptualised as ‘intensity meters’ meant to assess ‘the magnitude’ (magnitudo) of a patient’s illness in degrees.

The goal of this paper is to show – by way of a case study – how the contents of Proclus’ Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements were incorporated into university teaching in the sixteenth century. I analyse the impact of Proclus on the works of the Spanish mathematician and university professor Jerónimo Muñoz (ca. 1520–1591). In order to do so, I examine two manuscripts: Adnotationes in commentaria Procli super Euclidem (MS Vat. Lat. 6996), and Astrologicarum et geographicarum institutionum libri sex (MS Vat. Lat. 6998). I show that the contents of Proclus’ commentary pervade Muñoz’s mathematical writings and influence his mathematical ontology, his classification of mathematical disciplines, and the history and terminology of geometry that he adopts. Moreover, I expound on how Proclus’ text inspired Muñoz to maintain that the fifth postulate was a theorem, leading him to attempt a demonstration of it which pre-dates knowledge in the Latin West of Naṣīr ad-Dīn’s (1201–1274) previous attempt.