The Worlds of Oronce Fine

For someone who published and edited some seventy-four books on topics ranging from practical geometry, arithmetic, gnomonic, optics, music, astronomy, and cosmography, Oronce Fine (1494–1555) remains somewhat of a mal aimé within the fields of Renaissance’s mathematics and humanist studies. Though most scholars today would admit that he was not a great mathematician—the entry in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography concludes that his scientific work ‘may be briefly characterised as encyclopaedic, elementary, and unoriginal’—Oronce Fine received high praise from a number of his contemporaries. André Thevet, for instance, in his Les vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres (1584) lauded Fine’s accomplishments in mathematics as well as in instrument and map making, which ‘led to his being greatly admired, and caused him to be honoured by Kings, Princes, Cardinals, Ambassadors and others [...].’ As the first Royal Lecturer in mathematics at the Collège Royal (currently known as the Collège de France) Fine was from 1531 on the teacher of Petrus Ramus, Jacques Peletier, Pierre Forcadel and an entire generation of French mathematicians, ‘who went on to prepare the ground for the work of canonical figures such as Descartes and Viète.’ The thirteen contributions to this edited volume go a long way in reassessing Oronce Fine’s legacy and contributions to the discipline of sixteenth-century practical mathematics [Alexander Marr & Stephen Clucas]. He duly receives in this informative book the balanced historical and contextual assessment he deserves.

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