Dedications in Early Modern Scientific Books

In the early modern period, most scholarly works (as well as many maps, instruments, etc.) included a printed dedication. Historians of science have studied such dedications mainly as a window on patronage relationships. That aspect is important, but cannot be the whole story. After all, most reeditions still included the original dedications, even when at the time of publication the original dedicator and dedicatee were long dead. In this paper, I will offer a more nuanced view on the function of dedications. I will briefly discuss the genre in general and present some concrete examples, notably the work of the Dutch mathematician (and contemporary of Galileo) Simon Stevin. It will appear that the function of dedications was much more ambiguous than is often assumed.