The Tradition of the Aristotelian Mechanics ― Text and Diagrams

This book critically examines the complete manuscript material of the Aristotelian Mechanics. It does so to enable readers to appreciate the value of the treatise based on solid knowledge of the principles of the text. Without such knowledge, true appreciation is not possible. In addition, the book's critical examination helps clear up many of the current misunderstandings about the transmission of the text and the diagrams. The first part of the book sets out the Greek manuscript tradition of the Mechanics, resulting in a newly established stemma codicum which illustrates the affiliations of the manuscripts. It next presents a first critical edition of the diagrams contained in the Greek manuscripts of the treatise. The second part of the book shows that the diagrams are significant for a reconstruction of the authentic text, but at the same time they can be considered as a commentary on the text as they present information about the state of mechanical knowledge at a certain period of time. A final chapter examines different diagrams contained in mechanical texts from the early modern period for Renaissance in the framework of transformation of knowledge.

Joyce van Leeuwen is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. She received a M.A. (Classics) from the Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and a M.A. in German Literature from the same university. She pursued graduate studies at the Excellence Cluster TOPOI (Humboldt University Berlin) and Stanford University. In 2012, she defended successfully her doctoral thesis on the manuscript transmission of the Aristotelian Mechanics. Her analysis of the textual tradition of this treatise has been published in Classical Quarterly (2013). In the academic year 2012-2013 she held an A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests lie in Greek paleography, diagrammatic reasoning, history of mechanics, and early modern science. She is currently working on visual practices in scientific texts from the early modern period, and analyzes these in the framework of transformation of knowledge.