The Mechanical Tradition of Hero of Alexandria

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. The Mechanical Tradition of Hero of Alexandria 01.0_pp_i_ii_The_Mechanical_Tradition_of_Hero_of_Alexandria 02.0_pp_iii_iii_The_Mechanical_Tradition_of_Hero_of_Alexandria 03.0_pp_iv_iv_Copyright_page 04.0_pp_v_v_Contents 05.0_pp_vi_vii_Figures 06.0_pp_viii_viii_Acknowledgments 07.0_pp_1_19_Introduction 08.0_pp_20_73_Systems_of_Explanation 09.0_pp_74_139_Theorizing_the_World 10.0_pp_140_207_Hero_in_Context 11.0_pp_208_274_Hero_in_the_Age_of_Print 12.0_pp_275_295_Bibliography 13.0_pp_296_300_Index