Techne

Smallpox (known as "variole" or "petite vérole" in French) spread relentlessly across Europe during the eighteenth century gaining an unprecedented and deadly momentum. While there was no cure for this highly infectious and often fatal disease those that recovered from it were immune to future infections. This phenomenon was the origin of a practice of inoculation whereby infectious material was introduced into the body to induce immunity. In Europe this practice was initially experimented with in England and it was subsequently adopted across the continent during the eighteenth century. Inoculation was however not without controversy—not least because the practice originated outside of Europe—and it became the subject of intense debate. This debate this volume argues extended beyond medical circles to include intellectuals and the broader public—a phenomenon driven by a growing periodical press. As books scientific treatises and plays crossed regional and national boundaries debates on inoculation must this volume shows be examined within a European transnational perspective thereby considering how ideas were shaped by adaptation translations and citation. Doing so this volume not only sheds new light on the history inoculation as a practice but also illustrates how cultural history can enrich history of medicine

It is impossible to understand societies without looking at their technological underpinnings. Technology constitutes the very fabric of societies' political economic cultural and everyday realities. Building on recent historiography this book offers the first overview of the global history of contemporary technology.

Gathering more than fifty specialists of the history of technology the collection of essays presents an overview of technological evolutions on a global scale. The book challenges both teleological approaches on progress and eurocentric perspectives. It explores the complex socio-economic implications of ‘techniques’ (and not simply technology) as well as the systems of representation and power structures that led to the emergence of today’s world.

The purpose of the collected essays is to offer a new history of technology. In this perspective a central question concerns the very category of the history of technology i.e. the term ‘technology’ itself. Refusing both the limitations of ‘technology’ and of ‘useful knowledge’ the book stresses the necessity to study technology as embodying human activity as a whole. In that sense history of technology envisioned as techniques rather than purely technologies is intrinsically linked to anthropology and ethnology.

This book is divided into three sections. The first section opens with a world tour of techniques restoring the complexity of regional historiographies and of the meanings given to technological activities in different societies. The second part focuses on sectors of activity processes and products with a strong emphasis on means of production and communication the exploitation of natural resources major technological systems infrastructures and networks. The final section provides access to major cross-related issues. It pays particular attention to the role played by technology/techniques in the process of globalization particularly through colonization imperialism and the development of large technological systems.

What is technique in the arts? Now widely used to refer to the practical aspects of art making ‘technique’ was a neologism in the vernacular and started to appear in treatises on arts and sciences from around 1750. Rooted in the Greek technè which was translated routinely as ‘art’ until the mid-eighteenth century technique referred to processes of making or doing and their products. Described previously as ‘art’ ‘methods’ ‘manners’ or ‘mechanics’ techniques were recorded in text with the intention of documenting or transmitting practical skills and knowledge. This book bridges the gap between the changing concept of technique and the practices currently described by it. It explores the linguistic philosophical and pedagogic history of technique in the arts answering the question why the term ‘technique’ first emerged around 1750 and exploring how its meaning to artists art theorists and natural philosophers changed until the twentieth century

Since the early nineteenth century European pedagogical theory has stimulated a didactic turn towards the visual as an alternative to textual mediations of knowledge through books and lectures. Pedagogues and policymakers who strove for a more child-centred approach to teaching were soon joined by media producers and marketers in their aim to transform the classroom into a multimodal space for learning. From the turn of the twentieth century onwards teachers were increasingly pressured to incorporate high-profile media technologies such as stereoscopes lantern and film projectors into their lessons.

This collection of essays focuses on European educational light projection from its first appearance at the end of the nineteenth century through the 1990s when digital image projection started to gradually replace analogue film slide and overhead projectors. It explores the classroom use of these technologies. In doing so it challenges top-down approaches to the introduction of new visual technology and questions discourses that characterize the relation of visual media technology to teachers as one of consumption. The studies in this volume demonstrate how everyday demands and preferences transformed the 'ideal' instructional culture as put forward by policymakers producers and pedagogues into distinctive didactic practices that worked around or went beyond the pre-imposed ways of usage of visual media products. The volume moves beyond the view of instructional technology as a one-way route to modernization and teaching efficiency. By laying bare the power relations interests and ideologies at play the contributions also lend insight into the intertwinement between politics media material culture and classroom practices.

Cet ouvrage présente les traductions des trois traités de navigation écrits en latin (et restés à ce jour inédits) par Giovanni Poleni professeur de mathématiques physique astronomie philosophie mécanique expérimentale navigation et construction navale à l'université de Padoue : La meilleure manière de mesurer sur mer le chemin d'un vaisseau indépendamment des observations astronomiques (1733) Dissertations latines sur les ancres portant sur la figure optimale selon laquelle les ancres peuvent être formées la technique la plus performante pour forger les ancres la manière d'éprouver la force des ancres soit leur résistance (1737) le troisième traité concerne l'amélioration de l'usage du cabestan : De Ergatae Navalis praestabiliore facilioreque Usu Dissertatio (1741). Ces trois traités furent primés par l'Académie Royale des Sciences de Paris (prix Rouillé de Meslay). Un corpus traduit de la correspondance latine de Poleni avec les savants européens la traduction des programmes latins de ses cours de navigation ainsi qu'une enquête in situ à Venise Vérone ou à Padoue furent nécessaires pour contextualiser les traités. La reconstitution grandeur nature de deux machines de navigation de Poleni : le cabestan et la machine pour mesurer la force du vent réalisée par des étudiants de BTS Développement Réalisation Bois et des élèves de CAP Serrurerie Métallerie furent testées en mer. Cet ouvrage propose une biographie de Giovanni Poleni les « appels à projets » de l'Académie Royale des Sciences de Paris (1733-1741) les traductions commentées des trois traités de Poleni ainsi que la reconstitution de ses machines.

This book is about the development of optics and perspective between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. The point of departure of this book is the recognition of the polysemy of perspective that is the plurality of meanings of perspective. To bring forward the polysemy of perspective this book explores the history of perspectiva in terms of practices a conglomerate of material social literary and reproductive practices through which knowledge claims in perspective were produced promoted legitimated and circulated in and through a variety of sites and institutions. The ways optical knowledge was used by different groups in different places (such as the university classroom the anatomist's dissection table the goldsmith's workshop and the astronomer's observatory) defined the meanings of Renaissance perspective. As this period was characterized by widespread 'optical literacy' perspective was defined in different ways in different places and sites by various groups of practitioners. Most interestingly sites such as the theatre the instrument maker's workshop and the courtly garden were home to practices of perspective which have remained on the margin or even completely invisible in the historiographies of optics and perspective. The book also brings out the differences between codifications of perspectiva and practice. There were a variety of non-Albertian constructions to create the illusion of space and other types of optical knowledge were as important to artists as the geometry of perspective.