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Knowledge Streams: Im/mobility of Hydraulic Knowledge in Early Modern European Cities

par Martino, Davide
Référence Conference of the ERC project Water Cultures of Italy, 1500–1900 (13-15/09/2023: Ca’ Foscari – University of Venice, Italy)
Publication Non publié, 2023-09-14

Communication à un colloque

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Résumé :

This paper shows that early modern European cities played a key role in the transfer of hydraulic knowledge as sources, transmitters, and recipients, but also in creating friction within this transmission. Urban population density put pressure on hydric resources; it also allowed rulers and municipal authorities to extract resources and skills to generate hydraulic knowledge. Amsterdam’s pioneering water level measurements in the late seventeenth century, for example, were spearheaded by Johannes Hudde, former burgemeester and dilettante scientist. Hydraulic knowledge was transferred in cities by means of apprenticeships and the movement of itinerant experts but also through printed works. The use of Archimedean screws to fill a reservoir in sixteenth-century Augsburg, for example, was documented by a woodcut in Girolamo Cardano’s De Subtilitate (1554). Decades later, Augbsurg’s reputation as a center of hydraulic knowledge led Henning Groβ to dedicate his 1620 German translation of Agostino Ramelli’s machine compendium to the city’s council. By acquiring such printed works, cities could be at the receiving end of circulating knowledge; similarly, they could hire foreign experts to carry out hydraulic projects, as was the case in Brussels at the turn of the seventeenth century. At the same time, cities could also deliberately stifle and obstruct innovation. In order to protect its toll revenues, for example, not only did Haarlem repeatedly block the improvement of navigable waterways throughout Holland; its authorities also added clauses outlawing technological innovation to treaties with Amsterdam and other cities. In addition to legal measures, administrative structures such as guilds and bureaucracies could further prevent the transmission or development of hydraulic knowledge. By integrating these instances of immobility, this paper will show that the transmission of hydraulic knowledge and technology in early modern Europe was not always as fluid as scholars might assume.