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Manuscripts relating to naval architecture
These
manuscripts make up a small corpus of texts (see
bibliography) in which the boat- or shipbuilders, or those
supervising the work, recorded the information they
considered to be most important regarding the form and
armaments of boats and ships.
Because
these documents were written by experts for other experts
their interpretation can be difficult and ambiguous. They
were written in a local slang in
brief sentences that take for granted the reader's knowledge
of woodworking techniques.
Another
problem is that they often contain transcription errors and
lack modern punctuation, making it difficult to separate the
instructions given in a sentence from those in another. The
drawings, when included in a document, are either naive
depictions of the ship or depict only the profiles of the
stem and the frames and the methods used for tracing them.
It
is interesting that there is such a close similarity between
the notes written by squerarioli
(boatbuilders) six centuries ago and those written by those
working today: the vocabulary, the construction plans, te
templates and the units of measurement have remained the
same, so much so that it is possible to shed light on the
construction techniques of the past using the explanations
given by present-day boatbuilders.
Together
with Mauro Bondioli
, we are currently working on their comparative study and
the publication in facsimile complete with transcriptions.
We have included our comments in a separate section so as to
leave other historians the chance to make their own
interpretations of the original texts. |
