Chapter 4 - Hero in Context

Summary

The previous chapters unfolded how Hero inscribed himself into an evolving textual tradition and the strategies he devised to turn books into sites for exploratory engagements (real or imagined) with the world. Hero’s most distinctive features as an author are his systematic reorganization of a body of past technical knowledge into an accessible and orderly group of new texts and his deployment of that systematic knowledge to restructure how his reader negotiates between the textual and material worlds. He exhibits a deep concern that his reader be able to understand everything in his texts, and he often seeks to augment that understanding with vivid accounts of embodied engagements with the technologies he describes. His texts are often quite simple in their rhetoric and structure, but they open a window onto a world of material complexities.