The Making of Measure and the Promise of Sameness
Emanuele Lugli
Abstract
Starting in the late twelfth century, the governments of Italy’s newly-formed city-republics rejected imperial measurement standards and created new local ones, displaying them in their main squares. This book argues that this deceptively simple gesture—almost entirely overlooked by historians—triggered a series of revolutionary practices that not only redefined the cultural landscape of medieval and early modern Italy, but also laid the foundations of today’s ideas about precision, reproducibility, and truth. This book is thus both a sociopolitical history of a crucial component of medieval m ... More
Keywords: history of measurements, history of trade, Italian history, medieval history, history of medieval art, medieval architecture, Church history, objectivity, history of precision
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2019 | Print ISBN-13: 9780226612492 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: January 2020 | DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226612522.001.0001 |
