The Mechanical Tradition of Hero of Alexandria (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781009014052)

Hero of Alexandria was a figure of great importance not only for ancient technology but also for the medieval and early modern traditions that drew on his work. In this book Courtney Roby presents Hero's key strategies for developing, solving, and contextualizing technical problems, not only in his own lifetime but as an influential tradition of creating accessible technical treatises spanning multiple disciplines. While Hero's historical biography is all but impossible to reconstruct, she examines "Hero" as a corpus, a textual tradition of technical problem-solving capable of incorporating textual transformations like interpolation, epitomization, and translation, as well as intermedial transformation from text to artifact. Key themes include ancient and early modern technical readerships, the relationship between mathematics and mechanics, the materiality of manuscript and printed texts, and the shifting cultural contexts for scientific and technical literature.

Author: Courtney Ann Roby
ISBN-10: 1009014056
ISBN-13: 9781009014052
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Language: English
Published: 04/17/2025
Pages: 310
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.91lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.65d