The mechanical tradition of Hero of Alexandria : strategies of reading from antiquity to the early modern period / Courtney Ann Roby.

Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2023.

1 online resource (viii, 299 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Access is available to the Yale community.

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 10 Jul 2023).

Access restricted by licensing agreement.

Hero of Alexandria was a figure of great importance not only for ancient technology but also for the medieval and early modern traditions that drew on his work. In this book Courtney Roby presents Hero's key strategies for developing, solving, and contextualizing technical problems, not only in his own lifetime but as an influential tradition of creating accessible technical treatises spanning multiple disciplines. While Hero's historical biography is all but impossible to reconstruct, she examines "Hero" as a corpus, a textual tradition of technical problem-solving capable of incorporating textual transformations like interpolation, epitomization, and translation, as well as intermedial transformation from text to artifact. Key themes include ancient and early modern technical readerships, the relationship between mathematics and mechanics, the materiality of manuscript and printed texts, and the shifting cultural contexts for scientific and technical literature.

Cambridge core frontlist 2023.

Print version:

Books / Online

English

August 29, 2023