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Plate
14 from Nova Reperta |
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Humanist
Mining Practices |
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Georg Agricola, a university-educated humanist and physician, was from an artisanal family. His father was a dyer and wool draper, as was his younger brother Christoph. After receiving a Bachelor's degree at the University of Lepzig, Agricola went to Italy where he studied medicine. He then spent three years in Bologna and Venice, helping to edit Greek editions of Galen and Hippocrates published by the famous Aldine press. Returning to German lands, he became a physician and apothecary in Joachimsthal (now Jáchymov, former Czechoslovakia), a mining town in Bohemia. Later he became the town physician in Chemnitz in Saxony. As Agricola treated patients he also invested as a shareholder in mine operations while learning about mining and ore processing. His writings include a treatise on minerals and fossils, and the famous Latin treatise on mining and ore processing, De re metallica, first published posthumously in 1556. It became his most famous book, in part because of its spectacular illustrations. Agricola's interest in mining was fueled by the mining boom that enriched many German princes and investors in the first-half of the sixteenth century, including himself. The De re metallica
exemplified a combination of humanist learning and an interest in
the technical practices of mining and ore processing, and it raises
such practices to the status of learned disciplines that could be
studied in Latin. The preface is a defense of mining modeled after
the ancient writer Columella's defense of agriculture. Agricola
developed an extensive Latin technological vocabulary for mining
and ore processes. He also had an artist depict technical processes,
instruments, and machines in detailed illustrations. These two woodcuts
Pamela O.
Long
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