Alan H. Hartley | Duluth, Minnesota

From October 2005 through April 2007, I worked on the Michael of Rhodes project, a collaborative effort sponsored by the now defunct Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at MIT to analyze, translate, and publish Michael's commonplace book, which contains, among many other things, one of the oldest known treatises on shipbuilding. Michael, probably an immigrant to Venice, rose from the position of galley oarsman to galley commander and made many voyages to places as distant as London and the Black Sea in the period from 1401 to 1443. An international conference reintroducing Michael's manuscript to the world was hosted by the Dibner Institute in December 2005. The manuscript and the results of the project were published in three beautiful volumes (Facsimile, Transcription and Translation, Studies) by MIT Press in 2009 as The Book of Michael of Rhodes: A Fifteenth-Century Maritime Manuscript, edited by Pamela O. Long, David McGee, and Alan M. Stahl. I've prepared working glossaries of shipbuilding and rigging terms found in Michael's manuscript.