ABSTRACT
A third component of the anomalous nature of mathematical instrumentmaking was that it was a relatively new trade in Renaissance Paris. Unlike
64 ANTHONY TURNER
balances, the making of which is a closely related craft which nonetheless needs to be distinguished, 1 mathematical instruments had played such a minor role in the societies of the Early and Central lVliddle Ages, as to have given rise to no commercial manufacture and no craft organization. Like printers, with whom at least in the 15th and early 16th centuries instrumentmakers may fruitfully be compared, the earliest commercial instrumentmakers about whom we know anything are associated with the universities or with the courts. They were rhus protected. Unlike printers, who quickly became so numerous as to require regulating, instrument-makers, although increasing in numbers, were too few to pose any threat to the vested interests of the corporations, or to provoke the interest of civic administrators until the mid-17th century. By that time, however, they had contracted sufficiently close links with such recognized trades as clock-making, founding or inlay work, for it to be impossible to establish them as an independent group (for which they were anyway too few), and equally impossible to locate them in any one of the existing corporations. In periods and places were guild and corporation control was relatively relaxed, this fluid, ambiguous nature of mathematical instrument-making did not matter too much. However, where corporation pretensions increased, as happened in 18th-century Paris, distinctions hardened and the definition of roles was insisted on, it would have nefarious consequences for the development of the trade.
