Preliminary Programme

In this paper I seek to analyze hydraulic systems used in Portugal between the 16th and 18th centuries in gardens and estates of the countryside and to evaluate the influences received from the Hispano-Moorish legacy.
What devices existed in Portugal? What were the models for these devices? How they were distributed in quintas and cercas? Did it follow the same principle and devices? Does the hydraulic system determinate the design of the estate to make sustainable? What are the principles of sustainability found and delivered to a better use of resources? How erudite was the knowledge on water management?, are the questions thus posed.
The first step is to present the different hydraulic systems and water-lifting mechanisms used in Portuguese gardens and estates between the 16th and the 18th centuries: the cisterns, water-tanks, reservoirs, wells, water-holes, fountains, jets of water, gutters, gutter-pipes, lime-pits, natural springs, pit shaft, norias, scoop-wheel, kibble chain, and other devices for raising water, channels for conveying water, cascades, mill-races, horse-ponds, washtubs, trimming-tank and ditches.
This includes the very important etymological study of the words found in Portuguese documents and their comparison with Arabic, Castilian, French and Italian. The words can tell us a lot about the identity of the devices found. It will allow us to check if we can follow the route of al-yubb, caharij, saqiya, qanat, atanores, among others.
To reach the answers a cross-study of treatises on hydraulic, ancient descriptions and archival research took place. The comparative methodologies used to compare national case-studies with Spanish and Moroccan case-studies were intersected with the research for Hispano-Arab treatises written in the Iberian Peninsula between the 12th and the 14th centuries. We studied the treatises that have circulated in Portugal during the Modern period, such as Alonso de Herrera’s Agricultura General (1513), especially the chapter on kitchen garden where he describes the irrigation system; Gregorio de los Rios’ Agricultura de Jardines (1592); Salomon de Caus’ Les raisons des forces mouvantes (1615), Louis Liger’s La Nouvelle Maison Rustique (1722), Dézallier d’Argenville’s La Théorie et la Pratique du Jardinage (1739) when it includes a chapter on water management, Belidor’s Architecture Hydraulic, vol. III (1748) and then for fountains design Giovanni Falda and Charles Le Brun. This was an essential working axe to cross with hydraulic systems that remain in the field, but also with travelers’ descriptions and manuscripts descriptions and data gathered from documents.
In view of this, it is our goal to evaluate the level of erudition and sophistication of Portuguese water management. A comparison with the existing knowledge on hydraulic systems in use in the Iberian Peninsula shall take place, parallel to a discussion on the models, Islamic or Italian, more recognizable in Portugal is taking place. This paper will be the first presentation of the results of an on-going research project on Water Management in Portuguese Gardens and Estates. (Show less)

The distribution and exact documentation of technical information played a crucial role in the process of industrialization: It was needed for transforming, organizing and transferring knowledge about machines. And it is also crucial for the construction and design of machines on the drafting table. The 18th century can be considered as a period of transition from illustrative, artistic drawing of machines to technical documentation of machines, which became relevant for the arising engineering profession.
In the 18th century, the appearance of technical literature and drawings related to machines changed significantly. Concomitantly with the change in appearance, the perception of technical literature as well as the practice of (machine) engineering was altered notably. Adopting established drawing methods and techniques from arts and architecture allowed for appropriate technical documentation, entailing the change from a linear perspective to an orthogonal projection.
As a result, this “new” kind of technical drawings served as an important media for exchanging knowledge about machines. In addition, educational measures such as engineering schools or technological programs at academies and universities had a distinct influence on the (elementary) standardization in measurement and the depiction of machines in literature and drawings.
As one consequence of the development of specialized technical documentation and education, literature and drawings were not only applied to document and mediate information about current machines, but also to construct new technical applications in the second half of the 18th century. These developments of depicted knowledge in mechanical engineering will be analyzed in a regional approach for the Habsburg Empire, considering personal documents of engineers of the 18th century. Furthermore, selected economic sectors related to machine engineering, e.g. mining and commerce, will be compared in particular. (Show less)

Mining for minerals was an important source of income for early modern empires. This is especially true for the Habsburg Empires of Spain and Austria, whose economies strongly depended on precious metals for minting as well as iron for making tools or weapons. Miners, administrators, and rulers put great effort into raising production of their mines; a task they hoped to achieve not only by establishing new mines, but, above all, by gaining access to technical knowledge, developing and applying new technologies and thus improving the mines’ effectiveness.
Mining centres in the early modern age were not isolated entities, but formed networks that spread within Europe and even between continents. They were linked via labor migration and trade. The aim of this presentation, as of the underlying research project, is to show that in early modern mining, economic and personal links on one side, and the production, exchange, and re-interpretation of technical knowledge on the other, go hand in hand. In-depth analysis of technological advances in the early modern mining sectors of Austria, Spain, and Hispano-America proves that mutual influences regarding the production of technical knowledge were so intense, one may not speak of “Austrian”, “Spanish”, or “Hispano-American” mining technology, but of “Transatlantic mining technology”. In this sense, and taking this assumption one step further, it may even be appropriate to propose the existence of a transatlantic mining culture. (Show less)

Knowledge is always subject to circulation, and is therefore of dynamic nature. It
has been steadily contingent on considerable change in the past, and still is. The
rise of the printing press in the early modern period marks a first point of change in
the spread of knowledge and its speed. Whereas the Age of Enlightenment marks a
watershed in how knowledge was approached. The passage to the 18th century can
also be seen as an encyclopedic historical caesura. The increasing urge for knowledge, which up to this point has been collected rather uncritically, was then reviewed discerningly. In addition, the endeavours of a new, practically relevant, popular systematization concerning all fields of knowledge can be recognized by the genre of encyclopedias. These undertakings also made encyclopaedias accessible to a broader audience beyond domain experts by publishing them in their national language. Furthermore, the decreasing number of analphabets was important for these developments.
Encyclopedias are testimonials of knowledge of the time of their creation, they demonstrate the increase of knowledge, its importance as well as structural arrangement, and contribute to understanding their age of origin. They retain the knowledge considered necessary and belong to so-called compilative literature, with their main purpose being to pass on, complement, continuously update and restructure knowledge.
Thus the subject of this presentation, as well as of the underlying dissertation, has
been set on the history of knowledge based on selected geographical articles of Zedlers Universal-Lexicon, while focussing on the social production and circulation of
knowledge. The main questions asked are how, when and why certain knowledge
appeared and was lost again, which effects it had, in what contexts it operated, who
the carriers were and in which forms it appeared. For answering these questions, two
important dimensions have to be considered: the economic and the social one. (Show less)