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The Making of Measure and the Promise of Sameness
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About The Making Of Measure And The Promise Of Sameness
Product Description Measurement is all around us—from the circumference of a pizza to the square footage of an apartment, from the length of a newborn baby to the number of miles between neighboring towns. Whether inches or miles, centimeters or kilometers, measures of distance stand at the very foundation of everything we do, so much so that we take them for granted. Yet, this has not always been the case. This book reaches back to medieval Italy to speak of a time when measurements were displayed in the open, showing how such a deceptively simple innovation triggered a chain of cultural transformations whose consequences are visible today on a global scale. Drawing from literary works and frescoes, architectural surveys and legal compilations, Emanuele Lugli offers a history of material practices widely overlooked by historians. He argues that the public display of measurements in Italy’s newly formed city republics not only laid the foundation for now centuries-old practices of making, but also helped to legitimize local governments and shore up church power, buttressing fantasies of exactitude and certainty that linger to this day. This ambitious, truly interdisciplinary book explains how measurements, rather than being mere descriptors of the real, themselves work as powerful molds of ideas, affecting our notions of what we consider similar, accurate, and truthful. Review "Measurement no longer has the same invocatory power, but its reach is far greater. Market inspectors and public rituals of measurement have disappeared: in their place are international agencies that regulate everything from the purity of steel to the size of a pint. Lugli’s book doesn’t cover this world directly, but it describes some of the social and technical shifts that preceded it. Foremost among them is the creation of abstract units, all now defined by constants of nature." ― London Review of Books "With its remarkable aggregation of captivating moments in the history of measurement, from the writings of the French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s diary and pamphlet “Von Deutscher Baukunst” (“On German Architecture”), this book is bound to appeal to historians in a broad range of fields across the humanities. . . . [Lugli] delves into a rich array of understudied sources and introduces archival research as well as material evidence, such as the official standards of measure—medieval stone artifacts showing regional metrological systems that were displayed in nearly all Italian cities but have been overlooked by historians. . . . Lugli’s study will inspire future conversations about measurement, a topic that has been neglected by art historians for far too long." -- Susanna Berger ― Critical Inquiry “[The Making of Measure and the Promise of Sameness] is a remarkable achievement: written in short, pacey chapters, but underwritten by thorough scholarship (as the end-notes reveal), and full of surprising and entertaining insights into the stories and personalities – the particularities – of this complex history, this is a book that measurement has been waiting for. Lugli is an enthusiastic writer: one cannot help but to get caught up, as a reader, in his passion for the topic. At the same time, he is far from having been entranced by the moral and epistemic pretensions of measurement. Indeed, this is undoubtedly the history of an imaginative sceptic – someone deeply sensitive to the underlying, and inescapable, materialities and embodiment of a practice that often pretends to be independent of messy realities, as much of tools as social relations.” -- Maksymilian Del Mar ― International Journal of Law in Context "Emanuele Lugli shows readers the enforcement, negotiations, and politics that make the supposedly practical assessment of objects in space a centuries-long project of world building. . . . Lugli offers readers such immensely satisfying conceptual formulations as 'labelling various too
