Joyce van Leeuwen is currently working on a book on the Latin translation of the Aristotelian Mechanics with commentary by the Italian humanist Niccolò Leonico Tomeo (Quaestiones Mechanicae, 1525), which will be published in the framework of the Edition Open Sources book series of the MPIWG. She is especially interested in the diagrams and images in Tomeoʼs translation of the Mechanics, as the varying diagrammatic practices shed light on the context of the mechanical discipline in the sixteenth century.
She obtained her doctorate from the Humboldt University of Berlin in 2012 with a thesis on the transmission processes of the text and diagrams of the Aristotelian Mechanics. In this project she examined the Greek manuscript tradition of the treatise and demonstrated an urgent need for a new critical edition of the text. Her analysis of the diagrams contained in the Greek manuscripts of the treatise has shown that diagrams are a powerful means in studying processes of the transfer and transformation of knowledge.
