ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Practical Adaptations of Euclid’s Elements of Pietro Antonio Cataldi and Lucas Brunn: Knowledge Transfer and Textual Transformation in the Early Modern Euclidean Tradition

• In Event: Euclid and Geometry Across Traditions

English Abstract

Euclid’s Elements, a Greek treatise of geometry and arithmetic from the third century BC, was the most circulated, commented and translated mathematical work up to the twentieth century, worldwide. In the early modern era, it was commonly held as the necessary introduction to mathematics.
Owing to its abstract treatment of quantities and its axiomatic structure, together with its emphasis on geometry, the Elements was generally taken in pre- and early modern Europe as the canon of theoretical geometry, in contrast to practical geometry, which taught utilitarian applications of geometrical principles and instrumental constructions and/or measurement of concrete figures, without relying on logic-based deductions.
The emergence in the seventeenth century of explicitly practical adaptations of the Elements reflects an intention to break with its abstract and theoretical mode of transmission to render it more intelligible to beginners and more useful for lay readers and artisans.
This talk aims to examine this practical mode of transmission and transformation of the Elements by considering two seventeenth-century vernacular editions and commentaries of this work: Pietro Antonio Cataldi’s I primi sei libri de gl’Elementi d’Euclide ridotti alla Prattica (1613) and Lucas Brunn’s Euclidis Elementa Practica, Oder Außzug aller Problematum und Handarbeiten auß den 15. Büchern Euclidis (1625). It will analyse how these works reshaped the structure of Euclid’s text and extended the scope of its teaching to adapt it to their pedagogical agendas. It will show how such editions contributed to transform Euclid’s intellectual and cultural status, as well as the uses, public and modes of transmission of the Elements in early modern Europe.

Author

• Angela Axworthy, Bergische Universität Wuppertal / IZWT