This week dedicated to #diagrams is now over, but the work continues towards the publication of our results and the next phase in the life of the #EIDA community. Huge thanks to @obs-paris-psl.bsky.social for hosting us and for sharing it's beautiful secrets with us! #msca #histsci
I'd recommend trying the most recent large reference work in the field: Anthony Turner, James Nye, Jonathan Betts (eds), A general history of horology (OUP, 2021) which may also be available digitally to you through an academic library. At the least it will reliably point you on elsewhere.
Yes, I remembered the other sphere and even looked it up for comparison, but it's quite different in almost every stylistic respect. But maybe the presence of that other one on the same architect's building inspired this one?
Thanks! Fascinating if it's a modern addition - how did that happen? Who'd have thought there would be such a fan of armillary spheres nowadays? I can sort of understand armillary sundials still being a thing (they're seen up close). But this looks to be just about enhancing a building's dignity.
Looks very elegant - I wonder if it's contemporary with its building, or perhaps a later addition? Also really striking that they've cut out the zodiac signs to make them visible from a distance. Trying to think if I've seen that before....
Random, and with a dash of mystery - not even some prosaic alt-text to dispel the intrigue of the final image......
Is that first one the dials of Gonville and Caius College? Or am I overanticipating my own visit there on Tuesday?
And because of those history of science mss the exhibition would surely also have to include some medieval meh-thematical instruments - like the least prepossessing and badly engraved astrolabes and quadrants!?
And not a planisphere but apparently "thought to be the earliest known astronomical illustration rendered on a curved surface". Thanks for this reference! Not a site I'd heard of before, though that's because I evidently haven't looked closely enough at Elly Dekker's Illustrating the Phaenomena...
Astrology and the writing of history, addressed in a chunky 512 pages, and with an intriguing cover image too (a celestial planisphere from some sort of architectural setting? Will have to get the book to find out....)
Good to see it get an outing!
It was at that point that I quietly put the cork back in the open bottle of wine.....
As well as the whole series of rather wonderful problemata that come under the more general and abstract titles, and must have spiced up the debate enormously: "Quare, ut refert Plinius, hominibus ebriis apparet, quod sunt sapienciores aliis et omnia sciant? (p. 132).
Plenty of classic science of the stars material, such as "Utrum ad salvandas apparencias, que ex motibus planetarum fiunt in celo, oporteat ponere circulos ecentricos et epiciclos" (p.133). But also much more surprising, technical details - eg discussion of John of Lignieres on sines at p. 138?!
Thanks for posting - looks amazing! Just browsed quickly through the book's catalogue of the MS which preserves this two-week-long debate. (Underlines how little I understand of the structure and terminology of quodlibetal debates, though I can see there is lots of help and context given here.)
I do have a specific (pretty niche) project I want to do - on the changes Paul Ive made in the second edition of his Practise of Fortification, but astronomy and astrology have taken over for now, so it'll be some considerable time before I get back to fortification...
Lovely - thanks! Though I'm only discovering him today and actually his fortification text in dialogue form looks somewhat more intriguing, so your blogpost and its bibliography are both helpful. (Admittedly it's many years since I was last working seriously on the subject: doi.org/10.17613/y5r...)
... and diagrams that were assembled and bound separately from a written text that they must have accompanied. But did Rossetti publish such an astronomical work? Not sure. (But his fortification book has images that remind me of fractals and the en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelb... !)
Call for papers as part of the Scientific Instrument Commission meeting in Neuchâtel on 7-11 September 2026: “Mathematical Instruments and Medieval Libraries: Manuscript Practices and Material Circulation”. Deadline 25 February and full details at
hcommons.org/members/saje...
Ah - small world! Not actually in Oxford right now but I'll ask Sumner when I'm back (I don't think she's on here?)
And such variety too: there's Italian hours on some of those plates, but the one at top right seems to be a double projection, which I don't quite understand: it can't simply be rotated 180° because there's only one notch to hold the plate in place in the mater. What's on the other side of that one?
Very interesting, and I've just registered - but is it really hybrid? The booking and confirmation pages only give a physical venue (and I'll be in Oxford...)
The first page of Fragments of Ancient English Shipwrighty, showing Baker’s secretary hand and the unfinished drawings of Noah’s Ark and of shipbuilders. Reproduced by permission of the Pepys Library, Cambridge.
Unfolding the multiple lives of a shipbuilding manuscript: Our first Artefact of the Month in 2026 is known as 'Fragments of Ancient English Shipwrighty' and reveals the interactions between mathematics and practice in the Scientific Revolution:
uhh.de/csmc-aom-35
Ochre-coloured bound volume standing upright on a desk.
Detail of a printed sale catalogue title page.
Can't resist adding: turns out that the NAL also has a separate copy of the sale catalogue, which is bound with the list of prices and buyers that was printed after the sale. Yes, you even got to see who bought things back in those days! (Though you had to pay for the privilege by subscribing....)
Bound volume of 1957 auction catalogues in front of an (older?) 20th-century light switch
Visiting to see a specific auction catalogue ahead of a #TopSecret mission later this month. So, for now, all I can say is: check out the switch for the reader lamp in the background - maybe it's actually older than this set of all the Sotheby's London sale catalogues from May 1957?!
View of the first reading room of the National Art Library, London with desks and a gallery of books; image from https://www.vam.ac.uk/info/national-art-library
First ever visit to the National Art Library www.vam.ac.uk/info/nationa... at the V&A Museum. Cheapskate tip: register in advance, pick up your reader card and only then go to the cloakroom to hand in your bag - now for free.
Ah. Found corsair.themorgan.org/vwebv/search.... I didn't know Caesius was a cognomen of Blaeu...
Very nice - is that Jan Jansson? 30 years later and with print on pasteboard rather than manuscript on parchment. (I should really have tagged #volvelles and #astrolabes originally.)
Two pairs of large parchment diptychs on a reading room desk.
Timeline cleanse: #OTD 2016 at the British Library to view these extraordinary objects (other reader for scale). I first saw them in 1997 in the old BL MSS Room and finally published '"Preciseness and Pleasure": The Astrological Diptychs of Thomas Hood' in 2018 in doi.org/10.1163/9789...
