The Mechanical Arts

Abstract

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the term “mechanical” had three main senses – all interconnected and all relevant to the history of science. The traditional meaning referred to activities that were practical or manual. In the sixteenth century, the word acquired a new meaning, a revival of a classical sense, connecting it specifically to machines and their design and management. Finally, in the seventeenth century, “mechanical” came also to refer to a doctrine about the natural world. The phrase “mechanical arts” – artes mechanicae in postclassical Latin – had equivalents in a number of European languages. When linked to the first two of these senses, it referred to the skillful practice of a particular practical discipline or handicraft, including the working of machines. The disciplinary relationships and boundaries observed in the activities and writings of contemporary practitioners of the mechanical arts confirm the relationship of machinery to a wider context of practical work. They also show the importance, increasing over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of bringing mathematics into the characterization of the “mechanical.” This is both because the design and management of machines came to be regarded as a mathematical art and because mathematics became engaged in a range of other practical work. It would be difficult and anachronistic, for example, to define a boundary between the mechanical arts and practical mathematics, as carried on by people we might more readily call “mathematical practitioners” than mechanicians or mechanics, as the practical mathematical disciplines, such as architecture, engineering, gunnery, and surveying (often referred to in English as “the mathematicals”), were directly concerned with machines.

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