ABSTRACT
Such is the visual and mental impact of the superb images by Jean Moreau, Diderot’s illustrator, that some unfortunate associations have influenced our historic views of nail-making. The assemblage of tools tends to become locked in a time capsule pertaining to that period of around 1770, masking the evolutionary development and subsequent progress of nail-making techniques. The assemblage, and hence the technology, is assumed by many to be pre-eminently, or even uniquely, French. Recent research has uncovered older documentation showing that similar tools and anvil combinations were in use in Franken in an earlier stage of evolvement some eighty years earlier. Other German documents show traces of evolving trends and allied developments during the prior three centuries. The paper further hypothesizes that Roman influences played a part in nail-makers’ anvil and obore design, which survived in the trade until the demise of wrought nails.
