The most recognized part of the Dibner Library is the Heralds of Science, a collection of 200 works selected by Bern Dibner as the most important titles in the formation and development of Western science and technology. The Smithsonian Institution Libraries are building a web page that will describe the Heralds in more detail. The works described in Heralds of Science remain important milestones in the history of science and technology.
Lowe Lectures in Paleography and Kindred Subjects at Oxford, the Rothschild Lecture in the History of Science at Harvard, and the Meyer Schapiro Lectures at Columbia University. Most of the works from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century that he used to illuminate the intertwining of magic and technology can be found among the numerous treasures of the Dibner Library for the History of Science and Technology. The Dibner Fund supports a variety of programs designed to share the wealth and value of the Library with researchers and the general public and to promote the importance of continued study of the history of science and technology.
We thank The Dibner Fund for its generous support of the Dibner Library Lecture Series and its publications. For more information, please see the homepage of the Dinner Library of the History of Science and Technology at www.
He stood next to the magnificent Fountain of the Four Rivers, newly created and unveiled by an incomparable conceptual team, Athanasius Kircher and Gianlorenzo Bernini. Unaffiliated clerics and learned men, steeped in the magical traditions of the Islamic and Byzantine worlds, began to write positively about magic, in a variety of different forms. The Rabbit, from Giovanni Fontana's instrumentorum Bellicorum, Cod.icon. courtesy of the Bavarian State Library, Munich).
He filled his notebooks with precise attempts to show that he could model the anatomy and movements of the human body mechanically and invented striking automata. Here he denounced all traditional forms of magic, from astrology and alchemy to Kabbalah, as many types of fraud. As in many other contexts, here too, Agrippa did not use his own words when he began to speak in the language of new technology.
The new, mathematical magic that Agrippa encountered in Italy—the mechanistic, reductionist magic of engineers—even restored his ebbing faith in occult philosophy. During the sixteenth century, automatic devices invaded the everyday life of the European elite. Many," he continued, "attracted by the device of the Cyclops, look upon it, and suddenly find themselves.
Catholic proponents of the new mathematics often shared this radical Calvinist's enthusiasm for automata and similar devices. Even the most spectacular feats of technology of the late sixteenth century - such as Domenico Fontana's moving the Vatican obelisk to the Piazza di S. In the seventeenth century, however, the kaleidoscope of intellectual opinion gradually shifted, especially in northern Europe, as devices multiplied to exhaustion and from printers rained clear explanations about them.
And when they offered their readers a similar power, they did so in the terms of the mathematical magicians. The social physics of the billiard ball in Hobbes' condition also implied a new vision of the universe—one that made no room for magic in the traditionally learned sense. But it was the hallmark instruments of mathematical magic—the automata, with their mechanical vision of the human body and their ability to evoke wonder—that sparked philosophers' interest in technology.
In the second part of the novel, Don Quixote, Cervantes' hero hears with amazement the predictions of a talking head, which a young magician uses as a very effective tool. Yet at the end of the chapter he emphasizes that there was something magical about the talking head. Readers of the 21st century will likely see here, as elsewhere in the book, pure evidence of the hero's capacity for self-deception.
Being one of the most simple, enjoyable, useful (yet most neglected) parts of mathematics.
TECHNOLOGY IN EARLY
I see it as the question that unites my seemingly completely disparate studies of subjects in antiquity, in the Renaissance, in the Baroque and in the modern age. It is in pursuit of this kind of information that I have studied how people read books, how people wrote footnotes, how people built libraries. Doing the same kinds of things you would do to answer pretty much any historical question.
Over the years, the book collection has been supplemented by the Smithsonian's own holdings and gifts from individuals and institutions, and now numbers some , rare books. Areas of the Dibner Library are contained within and searchable through the Smithsonian Institution Libraries' online catalog. They were presented in his classic book Heralds of Science (Nor- walk, Conn.: Burndy Library, ; reprinted in by Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press; revised edition in from Burndy Library and Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution).
Dibner devised eleven general categories and briefly described his selection of the greatest works representing these disciplines. The publication is often cited in rare book catalogs (a particular volume is always marked with a Heralds number) and is a tribute to Bern Dibner's vision.
MODERN EUROPE
