(Note: This article was given as a talk at the University of Texas at Austin in 1976. It appeared under the title Early Technologies, Vol. 3 [Denise Schmand-Besserat, ed.; Los Angeles: Undena Publications, 1979]. It has long been out of print. This verion is posted with permission of Undena Publications and may be downloaded for non-commercial purposes. The author is available at bhall@chass.utoronto.ca)

In the preface to his now-famous Medieval Technology and Social Change Lynn White, jr. comments on the illusory quality of much conventional history. The historian shapes his craft on the implicit belief that "surviving written records provide us with a reasonably accurate facsimile of past human activity."¹ Until quite recently, however, much of the human race lived out its existence in illiteracy or in only marginal literacy, and thus in a sort of sub-history screened from the historian's gaze. The historical study of technology is particularly affected by this condition, for technology was chiefly the affair of subliterate groups in antiquity and through most of the middle ages. As White and others, both historians and archeologists, have shown, it is possible to explore the history of technology despite the paucity of written records, and in fact, the results of their investigations have been extremely fruitful. On the basis of this work, it is now possible to pose a different type of question than would have been possible a decade or so ago. The purpose of this paper is to explore the boundary between the sub-literate, and therefore sub-historical, phase of technological development and the beginnings of a continuous, cohesive written literature concerning technological matters. It is by no means an exhaustive study of this topic, but rather an attempt to pose the issues in ways that will permit further investigation.

Given that technology remained for many centuries after the appearance of writing mainly the concern of sub-literate groups, at what point do we begin to find technical writings appearing in significant numbers? What explanations can we advance for the change from orality to literacy? And what difference did the change make to technology itself and to the societies that encouraged technological effort? In all pre-literate societies, and among those sub-literate groups who practiced certain crafts in antiquity and the middle ages, pertinent technical information was obviously recorded and transmitted through memory and via oral and manual teaching. That this was an effective and flexible manner of proceeding is manifest to anyone who has ever studied, let us say, a medieval cathedral. Only in the two hundred year period from roughly 1400-1600 A.D. did this traditional pattern of information storage and retrieval begin to be supplemented on a large scale by written documents, e.g. handbooks, notebooks, and treatises, and by drawings or sketches intended for preservation. The tradition of putting pen to paper for these purposes had barely begun when the printing press was invented, and after a certain period of delay, the press became in turn an important means of distributing technological information to a wider public. Technology went through two shifts of medium in the period under consideration, from oral to written and from script to print. (It should be noted that neither shift entirely displaced the former media.) The experience of working in a new medium posed certain problems for technical writers, e.g. how to express complex ideas in words and pictures, or how to retain proprietary rights to new ideas. None of these was solved completely, but the way technicians dealt with them is of interest.

The appearance of the illustrated treatise and its printed descendant fostered contacts between the technician's work and the world of high culture, since the treatises were apparently read not only by craftsmen, but by aristocrats, lawyers, and intellectuals as well. The presentation of technological matters before such an audience helped heighten the technician's sense of self-consciousness and make him more willing to justify his activities in ways acceptable to Renaissance high culture.

The Shifts of Medium

The first significant change in the traditional way of remembering and teaching technical data begins to take form only about 1400 A.D. with the appearance of large numbers of manuscripts dealing with technology. To be sure, there are treatises on technical matters from before this date, but if one surveys the earlier writings in a general way, one cannot help but be impressed by the very small number of such works, by the way they are so widely separated in time and space, and by the fact that their authors were seldom practicing craftsmen. The rare exceptions such as Vitruvius² or the Alexandrian technicians from antiquity, ³ or Theophilus Presbyter⁴ or (possibly) Villard de Honnecourt⁵ from the middle ages, are precious to the interested historian precisely because he so seldom encounters their like. Illiterate craftsmen had neither the need for such treatises nor the means to produce them; the literate lacked the knowledge necessary to write on technical subjects and the interests necessary to create an audience for such works, were they to be written. ⁶ Indeed, even the skills necessary to copy correctly an older work were often beyond the scope of technologically untutored scribes, as is amply revealed by the present state of the Mappae clavicula, a collection of workshop recipes badly garbled by several centuries of transmission through monastic scriptoria. ⁷ The world of the learned and that of the craftsman were so widely separated as to preclude any serious possibility of creating a continuous, cohesive body of detailed technical literature, either with respect to initial authorship or the subsequent labor of copying necessary to preserve any manuscript book. The exceptions mentioned above merely prove that the separation was not absolute, and like a mountain rising from a plain, call attention to the absence of conspicuous features in the rest of the landscape.

After 1400, by contrast, there is a veritable flood of technical treatises; the written record becomes so rich that the historian is almost innundated with documents. There is a high degree of continuity between individual examples, indicating that full or partial copying was frequent and usually intelligently carried out. Not all the authors of such works are known to us (in fact there is a serious problem about what constitutes authorship within these groups of texts), but when we can discover an author's or copyist's name, it often reveals a practicing technical specialist. The quality of the anonymous texts is likewise sufficiently high to suggest "professional" technicians as authors. The change in quantity of textual material is too great and the change takes place too abruptly for statistical explanations based on the survival rates of perishable manuscripts to work in this case.⁸ The quantitative change as well as the qualitative character of the surviving works argues quite strongly that men of the fifteenth century rather suddenly began to resort to pen and paper in a field where their fathers had been satisfied with memory and the spoken word. We shall discuss below what seems to underlie this new impulse.

The second shift of medium saw the augmentation of the written tradition by the printed book. We are so accustomed to taking for granted transferences of this sort that we should pause to think that, in this case, it was far from easy. Technicians had only recently begun to write about their crafts, and much of the early literature was crude and inelegant in the extreme. The highly illustrated character of many of the early manuscripts would have made them difficult or prohibitively expensive to publish through the press. There must have been serious questions about the audience for any work of this type, since in comparison with such staples of the trade as theology or belles lettres technical works would seem to have had limited sales appeal. Quite probably, even if writers were available to do works on technology for the press, printers might well have been reluctant to undertake anything of the sort. Significantly, only a few of the fifleenth century manuscript works reached print, and these under unusual circumstances; most of the printed works appeared only in the sixteenth century, and they were deliberately composed with the press in mind. From the 1530's onward there is a slow but steady increase in the number of printed books on technology, and by the latter third of the century, print had become a suitable medium both for descriptive works and for presentation of technical innovations, as well as discussions of the significance of technology in general. This movement toward a fully public medium completed the transformation initiated with the shift toward manuscripts in the fifteenth century. Technology, which had once been nearly the exclusive possession of a particular craft group, ⁹ was now being displayed and discussed before a wide audience of educated, but unspecialized readers. By 1600, technical information was being transmitted through three main channels: the older, oral medium of the craft group; the manuscript which circulated among interested parties; and the printed work intended for a "semi-popular," moderately learned, lay public. With minor modifications, this situation persisted until the late eighteenth century and the rise of schools of engineering. Its final transformation came only in the following century with the rise of industrial societies and the beginnings of mass secondary education.

The Manuscript and Printed Works

The body of books, treatises, manuals, pamphlets, and notebooks in which these trends reveal themselves is far too large to be described completely in this paper. Indeed, there is still insufficient scholarship in this field to permit a complete description under any circumstances. Some brief remarks are necessary, however. The manuscript works of the fifteenth century appear first in Italy and those parts of central and eastern Europe where German was the vernacular. I have argued elsewhere that these regional differences yield two distinct schools or traditions which have only modest mutual influence before the end of the century.¹⁰ The trans-Alpine school begins with Conrad Kyeser's Bellifortis (ca. 1405), an illustrated treatise with metrical Latin text that actually deals with far more than its title, "strong war," would indicate.¹¹ Kyeser's book spawned a host of copies, imitations and adaptations; parts of it were still resonant in sixteenth or seventeenth century treatises on the arts of warfare. An apparently independent progenitor of later treatises was the very popular Feuerwerkbuch which must date from around 1420. Feuerwerkbuch is a practical, didactic manual for artillerymen and consists principally of recipes for pyrotechnic compounds.¹² Many German works contain portions of the two ancestral books, and virtually all later technical writings owe something to either by way of inspiration. An exception is the small group of mason's treatises which appeared in the decades around the turn of the century. ¹³ All of these works in turn stand as forerunners of such better-known treatises as Albrecht Duerer's on fortifications.¹⁴

The Italian school begins with Giovanni Fontana's small Bellicorum instrumentorum liber (ca. 1420),¹⁵ but it acquires its lasting character only after the period of Brunelleschi's activity in Florence. Mariano di Jacopo, called "Il Taccola," a Sienese friend of Brunelleschi, left two treatises (one unfinished) from the 1430's and 1440's.¹⁶ He was followed by another Sienese, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, whose compendious writings and illustrations on art, architecture and military engineering continue to be repeated even in seventeenth-century treatises.¹⁷ Among those who studied Francesco's works was the young Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo's notes and sketches are, of course, sui generis, but their mechanical and architectural portions can clearly be located within the stream of sub-Alpine fifteenth-century treatises.¹⁸ We now know that Leonardo did rework many rough notes and sketches into a more formal treatise on theoretical and applied mechanics which he hoped to publish. It has survived as the recently- rediscovered Codex Madrid I.¹⁹

The movement toward printed technological works can be dated formally from 1472, when Roberto Valturio's De re militari was published.²⁰ It was followed in Germany in the 1480's by Lorenz Lechler's little didactic treatise on building in the Gothic manner.²¹ Despite these early harbingers, only afler 1529 does the printed tradition gain momentum. In that year Feuerwerkbuch, after a long history in manuscript, was printed in two unrelated first editions.²² (These three works were to my knowledge the only ones to make an intact transit from script to print.) No simple scheme can encompass all the sixteenth century printed works on technology. There is a strong military stream stemming from Bellifortis and Feuerwerkbuch and extending unbroken into the seventeenth century; unfortunately, almost no scholarship exists on those works. There is a group of descriptive books more familiar to historians and concerned with mining and metallurgy: Vanoccio Biringuccio's Pirotechnia (1540), ²³ Georgius Agricola's De re metallica (1556), ²⁴ and Lazarus Ercker's Beschreibung Allerfuernehmisten Mineralischen Ertzt und Berckwercksarten (1574). ²⁵ The most interesting group of books for our purposes bears the generic name "Theaters of Machines." These highly illustrated Baroque encyclopedic treatises sought to present, often with more vigor than rigor, unusual or novel machines to the general educated public. ²⁶ The earliest of the "Theaters," and the source of their generic name, was Jacques Besson's Theatrum instrumentorum et machinarum (ca. 1569-70). Besson's book went through at least eleven editions by 1602 and was translated from its original Latin into French, Spanish, Italian and German.²⁷ Its influence can still be seen as late as the great Encyclopedie of the French enlightenment. For the sake of simplicity we shall ignore all Besson's numerous followers in the genre save one. In 1588 Agostino Ramelli, an engineering officer to the crown of France, published a lavish French and Italian "Theater" under the title Le diverse et arti/iciose machine. Though it lacked the number of editions Besson's enjoyed, Ramelli's book in both its original and a later German edition was quite influential. ²⁸

The Authors

To understand what took place between Kyeser and Ramelli, we need first to look at the authors of technological works. The earliest treatises, Kyeser's Bellifortis and Fontana's Bellicorum instrumentorum liber were written by men who were trained as physicians and astrologers. This combination, so strange to the modern mind, was of course quite normal in Europe since the revival of astrology in the thirteenth century. No one could hope to affect a successful cure of any disease if he remained ignorant of the complex of causal connections between his patient, the disease, and the astral and planetary influences. This in turn led medical astrologers to interest themselves in instruments, and especially in clocks. In a recent study, Lynn White, Jr. has pointed out how indebted we are to the medical star-gazers for information about late medieval technology; ²⁹ we might wish to mention in passing only Guido da Vigevano, an Italian physician to the French court, whose little treatise of 1335 on the technological needs of a crusading army has recently been edited by A. R. Hall. ³⁰ In their roles as physicians-astrologers commenting on technology, Kyeser and Fontana represent an older tradition. It would reappear from time to time (Agricola was a physician by profession), but most of the works that followed were composed by men of different professional character.

In Germany and in Italy in the fifteenth century, the needs of warfare were changing rapidly. The fact that Kyeser and Fontana devoted parts of their work to military matters should not surprise us; indeed, their interests provide an important clue to the shift toward the literate medium. Late medieval warfare is still a subject of some confusion, but it is probably safe to generalize by saying that war was becoming both more complex and more professionalized around 1400. The older ways of the feudal levy and the simple siege train of a few towers and catapults were being challenged by a host of hellish new machines led by firearms. Indeed, one reason for our confusion about this period's military history is our inability to assess the rapid changes in machines and their collective impact. Technological authors, on the other hand, seem less uncertain; many of them act as if war were primarily a matter of pitting one machine against another. They were probably correct to this extent: as war became a more complex tactical and technological business, the men who knew the machines of war, especially firearms, tended to become more important and valued servants of the political rulers. ³¹ This helps explain why, in Germany at least, there is a pronounced shift in the generations after Kyeser toward professional authorship of technological texts, and the profession most often represented is that of the Buechsenmeister or master gunner. I have not been able to determine the full range of the Buechsenmaister's normal duties in fifteenth- century Germany, but he seems to have been responsible in general ways for the making and repair of cannon and other siege engines, gunpowder production and transport, fortifications (particularly anti-firearms fortifications), and the use of all these in wartime, and general peacetime duties such as roadwork and public fountains.32 It would seem as if the old ingeniator, the "master of engines" of the thirteenth century was becoming a more general technologist, an "engineer" in something approaching the modern sense. If this is true, and if the assumption of increased value laid on such services is true as well, then the role of such men in putting pen to paper and recording their craft is more easily understood. One passage in the Feuerwerkbuch hints at this connection. Describing the duties of a good master gunner, the anonymous author mentions the conventional pieties, honoring God and one's prince, but he then goes on to insist that the master must also be literate, der Maister sol auch kennen schreiben und lesen. Why? Because without literacy he could not possibly "keep in mind all the elements that belong to this art."³³ We should probably not assume from this that technological complexity alone necessitated literacy, but rather that such complexity, combined with rising literacy rates, combined with enhanced social and professional status, all worked together to create a class of literate technicians who could and did speak for themselves, taking over the roles once held by physician-astrologers or other interested amateurs of technology.

The Germans move rapidly down the road toward almost complete militarization of the technical literature by the sixteenth century. The Italian school moves in slightly different directions toward a blend of artistic and engineering interests (to which we shall return shortly), and retaining an "amateurish" quality in its writings for some length of time. In Italy there is certainly no lack of interest in matters military (recall that Valturio's De re militari was so popular that it was the first to reach print), but the art of war is mixed in with and leavened by a broader set of interests in what we might call "civil" technology. Several studies by Frank Prager and Gustina Scaglia have pointed to the construction of the cathedral in Florence and to Brunelleschi in particular as the font of this concern with construction technology and its affiliated arts. ³⁴ Brunelleschi has left us no direct notes or drawings, but Taccola apparently copied and recorded many of his ideas, whence they spread widely into the literature, to be received by, among others, Leonardo da Vinci. Taccola was himself a notary by trade, though he moved in Brunelleschi's circle. Taccola's Sienese follower, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, earned his living primarily as an architect but he also did scupture as well as writing technical treatises. Leonardo is so broad in his interests as to resist easy categorization, but it is worth recalling that for most of his life after 1482 he earned his living as something like a "consulting engineer" and that his duties in this role included military technology and hydraulic engineering. The Italians seem to have begun writing about technology for many of the same reasons as the Germans. The differences between the patterns of such writings in the two countries is probably due to the different social and intellectual environments. We have learned to expect breadth in all things from men of the Quattrocento, and it is not surprising to find it in technology as well. By the 1500's, however, signs of specialization appear even in the Italian treatises. Biringuccio, for example, rarely wanders beyond the limits of his craft, broad though these were. Ramelli retains some of the older impulse to wander widely, but no reader of his work would have much difficulty guessing that he was a military engineer by profession. In short, despite initial differences, there is an increasing tendency toward specialization in technological writings, regardless of the nationality of their authors. More than anything else, this shows the increasing maturation and formalization of the movement toward literacy born among the fifteenth-century technicians.

Art and Technology

The blending of artistic and technological interests mentioned above represents another of technology's cultural relationships developed in this period. On the social level, the interest of artists such as Leonardo or Diirer in technology can be explained by reference to their relatively undifferentiated social milieu; artists and technicians were both regarded as craftsmen in the fifteenth century (though they were more separated in the sixteenth). There are deeper connections, however, that need some exploration. When I first began to examine the documents I am discussing, I noticed that the more interested a particular text was in mechanics or architecture, the more likely it was to be profusely illustrated. As I studied them further, I realized that I was approaching them with the wrong presuppositions. I did not have in hand a group of illustrated texts, but rather a group of pictures with running commentaries. We scholars are men and women of the book; to us it is axiomatic that words convey primary meanings, while pictures are secondary, or even purely ornamental. But consider the difficulties of a writer, let us say, on applied mechanics. It is quite difficult even today to produce a verbal description of a machine, or building, or complex technical process that can convey more than superficial meanings. Yet all modern languages used in industrialized societies are extremely rich in technical terms with exactly defined meanings, and all users of these terms are likely to have had extensive training in precisely how to employ them. The corresponding difficulties of a fifteenth-century writer have to be imagined. Though some technical terminology was available -- most notably in such tightly-knit fields as masonry -- most verbal descriptions had to be fashioned from languages still poorly equipped for the business of technical discourse. (There is, by the way, a serious lack of philological scholarship on questions of technological vocabulary formation in the pre-industrial world.) If neither Latin nor any of the vernaculars was really capable of precise descriptions in this realm, then pictures had to be used for primary meanings, while words were secondary, or even entirely unnecessary. Many of the "texts" (and that word is now to be understood as having quotation marks) from Kyeser to Ramelli, including Leonardo, are very nearly "picture-books" of technology with verbal comments. At times, the primacy of the picture is made unmistakably clear, as for example in a German work of the 1430's which dispenses with text altogether. ³⁵ Lest it be thought that such books were for subliterates only, let me point out that the work in question was a presentation copy for the Emperor Sigismund, to whom it is dedicated (naturally by means of a picture).

Fig. 1: Pictorial dedication of a textless manuscript to Emperor Sigismund, ca. 1435. In the original, the scene here depicted is repeated on the open page of the book being handed to Sigismund.

This emphasis on the pictorial has a number of implications. First, it forced an alliance between art (understood in its commonplace sense of graphic representation) and technology; anyone interested in compiling a work on mechanics had to be an artist himself to some degree, or had to work closely with artists, as we know Kyeser did.³⁶ This would make it possible to do an art-historical analysis of such works as they reflect changing styles of representation. More to the point, it raises the question of how changes in art affect the technologist's ability to conceive and express his subject matter. As Flemish realism and Italian linear perspective both penetrate the world of technical writings, they displace the old medieval illuminator's style of representation with a pictorial language that is similar to our own. Thus the later texts look "better" to the modern eye. Compare, for example, Das mittelalterliche Hausbuch (c. 1480)³⁷ or Duerer's treatise on fortifications with Bellifortis or any of the early German works .

Fig. 2: A German technical drawing showing the difficulties illustrating a complex technical device before the advent of linear perspective. The connecting rods attatched to the crankshaft are actually meant to project toward the viewer and to rest atop the trestle shown below the arms to form rocker-arms actuated by pulls on the ropes. The text (which is inverted in the original) makes this somewhat clearer.

Fig. 3: A slightly later German technical drawing showing pronounced Italian influence. Note how readily all the parts and actions can be perceived in relationship to one another.

It would be unfair to suggest comparing Leonardo with Taccola or Fontana, but the point would be the same. Within the realm of "pure art" we have learned to be suspicious of words like "better." "Is Raphael a 'better' painter than Picasso?" sounds like a silly question to us. Yet when seen from another perspective, that is, the value of pictures as means of conveying information, the question of styles is somewhat different. The later texts are "better" visually because their creators, having learned the Flemish tricks and Italian rules, are better able to treat the complex relationships of mechanical parts in three-dimensional space, and to portray them with less error or distortion. Thus the inventions of the artist provided the technologist with a powerful new vocabulary for portraying and transmitting information about his subjects.

It is also possible that art and changes in artistic modes of representation may have had some influence on the very process of invention itself. We have only a dim understanding of how mechanical inventions arose in the pre-modern era, but we are certain that they were not, as in our own day, logically conceived applications of previously thought-out scientific principles. If science played no strong role, what did? One answer may be found in Leonardo da Vinci's works, parts of which seem to display a series of imaginative variations on the morphology of machine parts as the intermediate steps toward new mechanical designs.³⁸ Leonardo, in a word, seems to have thought over his creations on paper through use of visual imagination (plates XVIII and XIX, ills. 4 and 5). It would be risky to extrapolate from Leonardo to his less gifted contemporaries, but there is nevertheless some reason to believe that other technical authors did approximate his method of inventing "on paper". To some degree, therefore, the ability to sketch with speed and accuracy may have been a means of conceiving new ideas as well as portraying existing devices. At the very least, we should expect artistically trained technicians to begin to validate their visions of machines by sketching them on paper as a preliminary step. The drafting pen may well have become a tool -- albeit an imperfect one -- to aid an inventor's intuition during this period.

Figs. 4-5: From Leonardo da Vinci's sequence of sketches for a complex gear in an anstronomical clock. The unfolding of ideas is indicated by the modern capital letters added to the drawings.

By the sixteenth century another artistic device was coming to have an impact on technological writings, the copperplate engraving. It was possible in the fifteenth century to print a work requiring some visual component, e.g. Valturio, by means of woodcuts, but the development of printing from engraved metal plates, which did not become common until the 1500's, was an enormous boon to technical authors. Their visual ideas could be reproduced with great fidelity in almost infinite quantities via copperplates. The great degree of dependence of authors like Besson and Ramelli on this particular artistic device is manifest at first glance.

Fig. 6: From Ramelli's encyclopedic treatment of technology, these jacks show how copperplate engraving made it possible to publish detailed images of machines. Note also the use of disassembled segments to show details of construction.

Quite possibly the relatively late appearance of such works, that is the timing of the shift to print, was in part a function of the spread of cheap copperplate engraving techniques. Moreover, since Besson and Ramelli, unlike their fifteenth century manuscript counterparts, could not themselves produce their drawings in the form in which they would circulate, there had to develop a complex network of connections between author and engraver, financier and printer before such works could be published. This too may have had a retarding influence on the appearance of such works.

Authors and Audiences

Another aspect of the culture of technology emerges if we ask about the way such works were used by their audiences. Obviously no one writes a book without some sort of user in mind (except, of course, for such purely private jottings as we see in Leonardo's Notebooks). It is difficult for us to place ourselves imaginatively in the milieu of the authors and to see just exactly who they had in mind when composing their works. At times the question is answered for us. Feuerwerkbuch, for example, is obviously by a gunner for the use of other gunners. Most of its contents have nothing to do with mechanics or ballistics as a science, but instead seem to have served as a sort of cookbook for the gunner, and some of the copies I have examined show stains and charring to indicate that they were used in just such a fashion in the workshop or arsenal.

The question becomes more involved when we turn to other works. The German tradition stemming from Kyeser seems to have almost no respect for what we consider authorship or textual integrity. Kyeser himself is, next to Leonardo, the most idiosyncratic and self-possessed of authors. His work is shot through with his personal likes and dislikes, leaning heavily toward the latter, and he even offers us his portrait and self-composed epitaph. (His is the first realistic portrait of an author since antiquity, by the way.) His followers, however, were of a different stripe. They tended to decompose, recompose, alter, edit, and delete old texts and then mix the result with new material from available sources. This chaotic blend of traditional and novel contents is the absolute despair of the orderly-minded historian, who wants his "texts" in neat rows suitable for making charts in introductions, but the Germans at least preferred a kaleidoscopic approach to such matters. We do find an occasional name attached to a work, usually a Buechsenmeister's, but it merely refers to the compiler, not the author in most cases. The epitome of the compilation approach is reached when we find deluxe encyclopedias of technology compiled from many sources and obviously made under noble patronage by highly skilled illuminators to grace the palace library, ³⁹ in fact one can sometimes trace the same drawing as it climbs the social scale from crude original to final entombment in a deluxe copy within two or three generations. The fact that aristocrats were interested enough in technological writings to purchase manuscript copies or to patronize "improved" editions is an index of the rising social status of technical authors and their subject matter, We should also note that the deluxe copies, like the "picture book" presented to Emperor Sigismund, seem slightly biased toward military technology' this suggests that a certain selectivity in what was patronized may have contributed to the military character of the later German tradition. In any event, the German evidence shows what we might call a "semi-public" literature of technology in which texts, drawings, and ideas are considered common property. They are circulated among interested parties and are available to anyone who wishes to copy or use them, without any apparent legal or social inhibitions.

The Italians seem to have more definite ideas about such matters from the very start. Brunelleschi, the man responsible for many of the new ideas in the Italian tradition, is reported by Taccola to have cautioned him against making such knowledge too widely available. ⁴⁰ Fear of theft, not deliberate obscurantism, was Brunelleschi's motive. What his complaints seem to point to is exactly the sort of attitude displayed in the German tradition. It was, of course, an attitude that was completely functional in the pre-literate days of technological development, and it would persist for some time into the sixteenth century. Taccola ignored Brunelleschi's advice at his peril and was repeatedly plagiarized, as was Francesco di Giorgio Martini, who complained bitterly about such treatment. ⁴¹ We no longer like to explain Leonardo de Vinci's mirror writing in the Notebooks as a response to fear of persecution (it came naturally to him as a left-handed person), but when we find him employing it in a draft of what was to be a formal treatise on mechanics -- Codex Madrid I -- we might want to attribute to him some desire to maintain proprietary rights in his ideas by making casual copying difficult. Elsewhere in his works Leonardo seems to fear being copied without credit.

What these men seem to want is something like modern copyright of patent protection. The history of legal devices to accomplish such ends is long and very complex. ⁴² Feudal rulers could assign various rights or privileges to certain of their subjects through "patentes" or letters of permission. Municipal councils could act in similar fashion with respect to items of manufacture or commerce which were of interest to the bourgeoisie of late medieval Europe. Inventors seem to have had mixed success in obtaining the type of protection granted to viscounts, monasteries, or wool-merchants. Brunelleschi was able, for example, to negotiate from the Florentine signoria a form of monopoly right to a scheme he devised for transporting building materials to the city for its cathedral. ⁴³ Johann Gutenberg, on the other hand, died in poverty when he was unable to protect his invention against expropriation by others. The printed book -- if not the press that produced it -- was subject to a degree of protection because it represented a salable item in which the printer might have considerable capital investment. Protection for books necessarily involved a modicum of protection for their contents, although this was far from being an established part of sixteenth century law, custom, or attitudes.

In the midst of this checkered pattern of protection and non-protection, Besson's Theatrum instrumentorum appeared. It is prefaced by a lengthy royal privilege giving the author exclusive rights to the drawings and the ideas they embody and prohibiting their unauthorized copying or employment for a period of years. The utility of Besson's ideas to the common weal of the kingdom is given as the rationale for this step. I am unable to find in the available discussions of copyright history any mention of Besson's privilege, but it would seem to be one of the earliest of its type in France, particularly since it combines elements of copyright and patent. Ironically, it did not prevent an Englishman, Cyprian Lucar, from plagiarizing Besson for Elizabethan consumption across the Channel. Ramelli's Le diverse et artificiose machine appeared with only a brief, formal royal privilege in 1588; perhaps Ramelli thought his standing at court would discourage potential plagiarists. Some of his drawings were, in fact, expropriated by a member of his household, Ambroise Bachot, and published a year before Ramelli's book came out.⁴⁴ Ramelli complains in his preface about the theft and especially about the publication of his work under another's name and in "mutilated" form. He does not however invoke law or custom to punish Bachot, but merely expresses the hope that the discerning reader can distinguish between his own true drawings and Bachot's false copies. These episodes indicate that the relationship between authors, their material, and the audience was still somewhat unstable in the late sixteenth century, but they also show how far attitudes (of the authors at least) had evolved since the fifteenth century. Kings, legislatures and law courts would wrestle for many decades with the problems of creating an effective body of copyright and patent legislation; indeed recent events show that there are still unsolved problems in this realm. Nevertheless, the subsequent development of such legislation did incorporate many of the ideas and attitudes that first emerged among technical writers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Magic, Science, Theology and Technology

One final cultural relation of technology needs consideration, its intellectual status or how it was seen to fit within schemes of knowledge. Again, there was considerable development in the two hundred years between Kyeser and Ramelli. The author of Bellifortis is outspoken in his views: the artes mechanicae include the artes theurgice, which rank just above the military arts in importance. Kyeser himself may have been a practicing sorcerer in addition to his astrological interests;⁴⁵ in any event, he organized his treatise around the major planetary signs, each of which governed certain arts. None of this is especially surprising. Technology had long been associated with magic in some of its forms, and the linkage would persist well into the seventeenth century. What is remarkable, in view of the utter conventionality of such views, is how little they were followed in either the German or the Italian schools. To be sure Kyeser's astrological symbols are reiterated in many of the works influenced by Bellifortis, but only occasionally do the signs preserve their organizing character. More often they are simply repeated out of context, and many texts dispense with magical overtones completely. Perhaps the drift towards military authors helped remove technology from its magical roots. The only persistent evidence of magical connections appears in the tendency of collectors of such manuscripts to bind them with other works on divination or natural magic. The Italians, at least after Fontana, show little inclination to assert a link between technology and magic; from time to time the "magical" properties of this plant and that animal will creep in, but there is nothing by way of systematic magic in the texts. Indeed, the early Italian authors seem quite uninterested in locating technology within any scheme of arts and sciences, except for Leonardo, who was always a bit more inclined toward theory than his predecessors. Leonardo's views on technology are not very clear, but his high respect for mathematics makes it seem at times that he considers mechanics to be related to geometry.

The connection at which Leonardo hints was to become a major theme of the sixteenth century works, particularly the "Theaters." For reasons that are not yet clear, the prefaces to such works run to great lengths to justify their appearance; thus they provide an excellent source for assessing attitudes toward technology in the period. Besson's work, for example, though it contains no pretace in its original printed version did have one in its manuscript form, and this has recently been studied by Alexander Keller.⁴⁶ Besson stresses the mathematical foundations of mechanics and seeks to provide the reader with general theories that underlie his inventions. The theory is somewhat disappointing to eyes accustomed to the glories of mathematical mechanics as expounded by Galileo and Newton; it is mainly conventional Aristotelianism with a bit of Archimedes thrown in. Still, though this may not be the font of the scientific revolution, it is interesting to note that the intention to link mathematics, physical theory and practical mechanics in one nexus is already part of the culture of technology by this date. Besson was a teacher of mathematics by profession, and one might be tempted to accuse him of expounding a purely personal philosophy were it not for the reiteration of many of the same themes by Ramelli and other writers. Ramelli's sense of mathematics is far cruder than Besson's (he reasserts, for example, medical astrology as a parallel case of the utility of applied mathematics) and his theory is far weaker, but he compensates by stressing at great length the public utility of new inventions.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the prefaces to the "Theaters" is the stress they almost always lay on theological justifications for technology. The mechanical arts are God's gift to mankind; they offer some compensation for the losses suffered at the time of the Fall. They alleviate, at least in part, the primordial curse of earning one's bread in the sweat of one's face. Properly practiced, they represent an imitation of the divine act of creation, and thus they are part of man's image-likeness to God as stated in Genesis 1. Just as God has ordered all things according to measure, weight, and number, so too the mechanical technologist arranges his creations according to the same principles.⁴⁷ Perhaps we would be unwise to make too much of these relatively conventional statements; many of them were derivative from scholastic thought and some may have been merely rhetorical "window dressing." Nevertheless, they seem to mark a definite attempt by technologists to win a recognized place in the order of the intellectual world by linking their activities to an undeniably important aspect of the high culture of the sixteenth century. They indicate that technology has moved away from its earlier associations with magic and theurgy and has become, at least in the minds of its articulate practitioners, an activity characterized by public utility, justified by the highest of theological considerations and rooted in the oldest of sciences, mathematics.⁴⁸ To this extent, the attitudes we usually associate with the seventeenth century were brought forth in the new body of technical writings from the preceding two centuries.

Conclusion

This outline of the relations between technology and culture is obviously a sketchy, preliminary attempt to indicate major areas where further work is needed. All the problems discussed above, the nature of technical writings, their authors and audiences, the philological problems they present, their connections with art, their legal history, and their relationship to science and theology--all these could benefit greatly from further consideration by specialized scholars. The history of early technology is largely virgin territory where important questions far outnumber significant answers. For example, one criticism that is frequently made of the works under discussion has been ignored in this paper, viz. that they often contain fantastic, impractical designs or devices. There is ample room for a study of technological fantasy as it began to emerge in these manuscripts and books; possibly such a study would tell us a great deal about the way western Europeans conceived of their arts and crafts in this period. Similarly, questions of cross-cultural comparison have been omitted. Is there any comparable literature outside Europe, and if so, how does it compare to the European style in these matters? The purpose of this paper has been two-fold: 1) to suggest alternative approaches to the history of early technology; and 2) to show that changes in the means by which technical data are stored and transmitted have implications for the interplay of influences between technology and the societies that foster technical achievement. We once thought that modern technology had its genesis in the period we liked to call the "Renaissance" and that it was somehow connected with the "revival of letters." We now know that the sub-literate craftsmen of medieval Europe gave birth to far more than the scribblers of later times; we also know that we were misled by the illusion to which Lynn White referred so that we mistook the documents for the activities they represent. Nevertheless, the scribblers had a contribution to make, for they help bridge the gap between the medieval technological accomplishment and its modern counterpart. If we are to understand the highly complex, but also highly significant process of technological evolution between the end of the middle ages and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, then we must investigate in depth the cultural relationships surrounding technology in this period.

End notes

1. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 1962), v.

2. F. Granger (ed. and trans.), Vitruvius on Architecture (London: Heinemann, 1934).

3. A. G. Drachmann, Ktesibios, Philon, Heron (Copenhagen: 1948); The Mechanical Technology of Greek and Roman Antiquity (Madison: University of Winsconsin Press, 1963). Eric W. Marsden, Greek and Roman Artillery (2 vols.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969-71) gives detailed information on the military technology of these men.

4. C.R. Dodwell (ed. and trans.), Theophilus Presbyter, De diversis artibus (London: Nelson, 1961); John G. Hawthorne and C.S. Smith (eds. and trans.), On Divers Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963).

5. Theodore Bowie (ed.), Villard de Honnecourt, Sketchbook (2nd ed.; New York: Wittenborn, 1962). Cf. Alfred Darcel (ed.), Album de Villard de Honnecourt (Paris: Laget, 1968).

6. Lynn White, jr., "Medieval Engineering and the Sociology of Knowledge," Pacific Historical Review, 44 (1975), 1-21 discusses several aspects of this topic.

7. C.S. Smith and John G. Hawthorne, Mappae clavicula: A Little Key to the World of Medieval Techniques ("Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, N.S. 64, pt 4;" Philadelphia: 1974), 14ff.

8. Most of these remarks are discussed in greater detail in my disssertation, "The Manuscript of the So-Called 'Hussite Wars' Engineer' and Its Technological Milieu: A Study and Edition of Codex latinus monacensis 197, Part 1." (University of California, Los Angeles: Department of History, 1971). This work is scheduled to appear in 1978 as The Technological Illustrations of the So-Called "Anonymous of the Hussite Wars," (Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag).

9. The use of the term "craft group" rather than "guild" is a deliberate attempt to avoid some of the institutional complexities associated with the latter. Not all medieval craftsmen were organized into guilds, nor were all guilds composed of craftsmen. Still, it is plausible to assume that changes in guild structure and membership may have had some influence on the movement toward writing, and conversely, the existence of a written tradition may have influenced the history of guilds. In any case, the study of the relationship between guilds and the documents under consideration would necessarily require more work than is presently available, and it cannot be dealt with in this paper.

10. See note 8. The most extensive bibliography of such works is still found in Max Jaehns, Geschichte der Kriegswissenschaften, vornehmlich in Deutschland, Vol. 1 (Muenchen and Leipzig: Oldenbourg, 1889). This should be used with caution, however.

11. Goetz Quarg (ed. and trans.), Conrad Kyeser aus Eichstaett, Bellifortis (2 vols.; Duesseldorf: V.D.I. Verlag, 1967). Cf. the critical review of this work by Hermann Heimpel in Goettingische gelehrte Anzeigen, 223, Heft 1/2 (1971), 115-48.

12. The only available edition is that of Wilhelm Hassenstein, Das Feuerwerkbuch von 1420 (Muenchen: 1941). Hassenstein was a dedicated Oberregierungsrat in the NS regime, and his work should be used with extreme caution. This edition is virtually impossible to obtain in Europe or North America, but I would be happy to make xerox copies available to any interested scholars for research purposes.

13. Lon R. Shelby, Gothic Design Techniques: The Fifteenth-Century Design Booklets of Mathes Roriczer and Hanns Schmuttermayer (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977). My thanks to Professor Shelby for allowing me to read a copy of this work in proof sheets.

14. Alvin E. Jaeggli (ed. and trans.), Albrecht Durer, Unterricht ueber die Befestigung der Staedte, Schloesser und Flecken (Dietikon: Stocker, 1971).

15. Muenchen, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cod. icon. 242; no modern edition has been made. See Marshall Clagett, "The Life and Works of Giovanni Fontana," Annali dell'Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze, 1(1976), 5-28.

16. Gustina Scaglia (ed. and trans.), Mariano Taccola, De machinis: The Engineering Treatise of 1449 (2 vols ; Wieshaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 1971). See also Frank D. Prager and Gustina Scaglia, Mariano Taccola and His Book De ingeneis (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972).

17. Corrado Maltese (ed.), Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Trattati di architettura, ingegneria e arte militare (Milan: Polifilio, 1967).

18. Bertrand Gille, Engineers of the Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1966). Gille may have overreacted to the tendency to celebrate Leonardo's accomplishments, but his work still contains one of the best studies of the relationship between Leonardo and the evolving tradition of fifteenth century writings on technology

l9. Ladislao Reti (ed. and trans.), Leonardo da Vinci, The Madrid Codices (5 vols.; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974). Cf. Bert S. Hall, "The New Leonardo," Isis, 67 (1976), 463-476.

20. Erla Rodaliewicz, "The editio princeps of Roberto Valturio's De re militari in Relation to the Dresden and Munich Manuscripts," Maso Finiguerra, 5 (1940), 15-82.

21. See note 13.

22. (Augsburg: Heinrich Stainer, 1529) and (Strassburg: Christain Engenolphen, 1529), the latter under the title Buechsenmeisterei: von Geschoss, Buechsen, Pulver, Salpeter, und Feuerwerk.

23. Cyril Stanley Smith and Martha Teach Gnudi (eds. and trans.), The Pirotechnia of Vannoccio Biringuccio (2nd ed.; New York: Basic Books, 1959).

24. Herbert Clark Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover (eds. and trans.), (London: The Mining Magazine, 1912).

25. Anneliese G. Sisco and C. S. Smith (eds. and trans.), Lazarus Ercker, Treatise on Ores and Assaying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951).

26. No general work on the "Theaters" has been done. A semi-popular discussion with a generous selection of representative sample plates is found in Alexander Keller, A Theater Of Machines (New York: MacMillan, 1965).

27. The original edition appeared without indication of date or publisher under the title Instrumentorum et machinarum liber primus.. On internal evidence this must have appeared after June 27, 1569. There were four editions in 1578 under the standard title in Latin, French and both languages, all published by Bartholemy Vincent in Lyons. Vincent also produced another French edition (1579), another Latin edition (1582), and an Italian edition (1582). A French version was published in Geneva by 1. Chouet in 1594, a German version by J. Folliet in Muembelgart in 1594, and a Spanish edition by H. Cardon in Leon in 1602.

28. Eugene S. Ferguson and Martha Teach Gnudi (eds. and trans.), The Various and Ingenious Machines of Captain Agostino Ramelli (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

29. Lynn White, jr., "Medical Astrologers and Late Medieval Technology," Viator, 6 (1975), 295-309.

30. A. Rupert Hall, "Guido's Texaurus, 1335," in Bert S. Hall and Delno C. West (eds.), On Pre-Modern Technology and Science ("U.C.L.A. Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Humana Civilitas, Vol. 1;" Malibu, Calif.: Undena, 1976), 11-52.

31. Evidence for this claim is admittedly sketchy, largely because the lives of early technicians still represent terra incognita in all but a few cases. See Lynn White, Jr., "Jacopo Aconcio as an Engineer," American Historical Review, 72 (1967), 425-444; also Carlo Promis, Biografie di ingeguieri mifitan italian dat secolo xiv alla metd xviii (Turin: 1874).

32. Leonardo's surviving draft of a letter to Ludovico Sforza, "Il Moro," seeking employment as an engineer and describing his many skills is perhaps the best concise statement of what an engineer was expected to do in this period. Gille Engineers, I 25-126 quotes it in full. One might object that Leonardo was a polymath. and in any case everyone exaggerates his range in job-seeking letters, but there is ample evidence in other treatises and notebooks that Leonardo's list is essentially valid for his less gifted contemporaries. The German Buechsenmeister was probably expected to know about as much is his Italian counterpart

33. Cited in full (see note 8).

. 34. Frank D. Prager and Gustina Scaglia. Brunelleschi: Studies of His Technology and Inventions(Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press, 1970) Cf. Prager and Scaglia, Taccola.

35. Vienna, Waffensammlung des kunsthistorischen Museums, MS P 5014, frontispiece. The relationship of words and pictures in a number of late medieval works needs further consideration. It is probably incorrect to assume that picture-Bibles, for example, were entirely considered as suitable only for the poor or illiterate. Conversely, texts with illustrations often treat the picture as pure ornament without any intrinsic descriptive value whatsoever. Whatever late medieval men thought about pictures in relationship to words, their attitudes were surely very different from ours.

36. Lynn White, Jr., "Kyeser's "Bellifortis": The First Technological Treatise of the Fifteenth Century," Technology and Culture10 (1969), 437.

37. Helmuth Th. Bossert and Willy F. Storck (eds.), Das mittelalterliche Hausbuch (Leipzig: Seeman, 1912).

38. I have analyzed one such case in detail. See Bert S. Hall and Ian Bates, "Leonardo, the Chiaravalle Clock and Epicyclic Gearing: A Reply to Antonio Simoni," Antiquarian Horology 9 (1976), 910-917 The same general method seems to have been used in Leonardo's invention of a pendulum regulator for clockwork; cf. the review cited in note 19 above. A comparable, if considerably simpler case concerns the invention of a parachute in the 1470's. See Lynn White, jr., "The Invention of the Parachute," Technology and Culture, 9 (1968) 462-67.

39. Among the best of these deluxe editions is Erlangen, Universitaetsbibliothek, MS 1390, known as the Kriegsbuch of Ludwig von Eybe zum Hartenstein (der Juengerre) and dating from ca. 1500. Another splendid specimen is Weimar, Nationale Forschungs- und Gedenkstaetten der klassischen Deutschen Literatur, MS fol. 328, the so-called "Ingenieur Kunst- und Wunderbuch " This must date in part from the closing decades of the fifteenth century and in part frorn the early decades of the sixteenth. No articles have appeared in the literature on the Erlangen work; the Weimar text is discussed by E. Marx, "Bericht ueber ein Dokument mittelalterlicher Technik," Beitraege zur Geschichte der Technik und Industrie,, 16 (1926), 317-321.

40. Prager and Scaglia, Brunelleschi, 1 28ff.

41. Ladislao Reti, "Francesco di Giorgio Martini's Treatise on Engineering and its Plagiarists," Technology and Culture, 4 (1963) 287-298.

42. On the early phases of this development, see: Guilio Mandich, "Venetian Patents (1450-1550)," Journal of the Patent Offfice Society (1948). 166-224, and "Venetian Origins of Inventor's Rights," JPOS, 42 (1960), 378-382. Maximilian Frumkin, "The Origin of Patents," JPOS, 27 (1945), 143-I 49; "Early history of Patents for Invention," Transactions of the Newcomen Society, 26 (1947-49), 47-56; and "Les anciens brevets d'invention," Archives internationales d'histoire des sciences, N.S. 7 (1954), 315-323. Ramon A. Klitzke, "Historical Background of the English Patent Law," JPOS, 4! (1959), 615-650. Hansjoerg Pohlmann, "The Inventor's Right in Early German Law," JPOS, 43 (1961), 121 - 139. Frank D. Prager, "Examination of Inventions from the Middle Ages to 1836." JPOS, 46 (1964). 268-291. Lyman R. Patterson, Copyright in internatinal perspective, (Nashville, Teno.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968). Harry Ransom, The First Copyright Statute (Austin: University of' Texas Press, 1956).

43. Prager and Scaglia, Brunelleschi, 111ff.

44. Martha Teach Gnudi, "Agostino Ranielli and Ambroise Bachot," Technology and Culture, 15 (1974) 614-625. 45 White (see note 36), 438.

4 5. Alexander Keller, "A Manuscript Version of Jacques Besson's Book of Machines, With His Unpublished Principles of Mechanis," in Hall and West (see note 30), 75-106.

47. These and many other themes are analyzed in detail in Ansgar Stoecklein, Leitbilder der Technik: Biblische Tradition und technischer Fortschritt (Muenchen: Heinz Moos, 1969).

48. The exact nature of these transformations is yet another subject in need of further study. There seems to have been a continuous evolution of such attitudes from the scholastic and moralistic writings to the documents under consideration. Cf. Stoecklein's monograph cited above and Peter Sternagel, Die artes mechanicae im Mittelalter: Begriff- und Bedeutungsgeschichte bis zum Ende des 13. Jahrhunderts ("Muenchner Historische Studien, Band 2;" Kallmuenz: Lassleben, 1966).