Aristotelian Mechanics

Joyce van Leeuwen is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. She received a M.A. (Classics) from the Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and a M.A. in German Literature from the same university. She pursued graduate studies at the Excellence Cluster TOPOI (Humboldt University Berlin) and Stanford University. In 2012, she defended successfully her doctoral thesis on the manuscript transmission of the Aristotelian Mechanics. Her analysis of the textual tradition of this treatise has been published in Classical Quarterly (2013). In the academic year 2012-2013 she held an A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests lie in Greek paleography, diagrammatic reasoning, history of mechanics, and early modern science. She is currently working on visual practices in scientific texts from the early modern period, and analyzes these in the framework of transformation of knowledge.

• 1. Introduction.- 2. General Characteristics of the Transmission.- 3. The Textual Transmission.- 4. Editing Diagrams.- 5. Diagrammatic Reasoning.- 6. Early Modern Transformations of Mechanics.- 7. Conclusion.

“Joyce van Leeuwen’s book is an analysis of the manuscript and print tradition of the Mechanics. … the book is a good read for any graduate student dealing with variant readings of texts with a long manuscript or print history. … Van Leeuwen’s book is foundational in its careful examination of the manuscript tradition. Its analysis of the diagrams is unique among studies of the Mechanics.” (Jean De Groot, ISIS, Vol. 109 (1), March, 2018)