ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

From the Hand to the Eye: How the ‘Skills’ of Makers and Historians Can Alter the Functions of Planispheric Astrolabes

• In Event: Contested Success and Celebrated Failure: The Practice of Mathematical Instruments in Varied Settings I

English Abstract

The ongoing project to catalogue the astrolabes held at the Museo Galileo has brought to light two different types of "failures": those by the makers of the instruments themselves, and well as those by historians seeking to interpret them. This paper highlights how the two types of failure could be tightly interconnected and how they were bound up with misleading, long-enduring methodologies.

Author

• Giorgio Strano, Museo Galileo: Institute and Museum of the History of Science, Florence