Introduction

So wrote the engineer Filippo Pigafetta in the preface to his 1581 translation of Guidobaldo dal Monte’s Mechanicorum liber. By the time Pigafetta was writing, the idea of a general renaissance in learning had become commonplace, and although his list of arts and sciences lost in the Middle Ages now seems somewhat exaggerated, there is much truth in his suggestion of a renaissance in mechanics. The previous century or so had witnessed both the recovery and assimilation of ancient and medieval works on mechanics as well as a growing sense of the importance of mechanics for practical and civic life, culminating in the book by Guidobaldo that he was translating. Little could he have imagined, however, that within a century the mechanics he saw now restored to light would become the principal component of a revolution in science and would provide the dominant metaphor for all the works of nature, bringing an end to the scholastic natural philosophy of the Middle Ages and ushering in the mechanical philosophy of the seventeenth century.