Modern mechanics was forged in the seventeenth century from materials inherited from Antiquity and transformed in the period from the Middle Ages through to the sixteenth century. These materials were transmitted through a number of textual traditions and within several disciplines and practices, including ancient and medieval natural philosophy, statics, the theory and design of machines, and mathematics.

This volume deals with a variety of moments in the history of mechanics when conflicts arose within one textual tradition, between different traditions, or between textual...

This book gives an account of the origins of theoretical mechanics in antiquity, its limited reception in the Arabic and Latin Middle Ages, and its recovery and subsequent development in Italy to the time of Galileo. From late antiquity to the fifteenth century, the ancient science of mechanics—the theory of machines—was almost completely unknown in the Latin west. Then, from the mid-fifteenth century on, Italian humanists began to recover the ancient texts, and from them through the sixteenth century Italian mathematicians restored the ancient science of mechanics. The...