Cosmography

Images of the Ptolemaic cosmos were produced in all three major early medieval successors to the Roman Empire (the Carolingian, the Byzantine, and the Umayyad states). Early medieval cosmological images remained formally and iconographically close to their late antique models. T…

In the dissertation, set in the early phases of the Scientific Revolution, I use a series of sixteenth-century legal disputes over the practice of navigation to probe the construction of the idea of the utility of science and the growth of state patronage of science. I show how …