Francis Maddison; World authority on Arab-Islamic mathematical and scientific instruments and their makers

[Hyfler/Rosner]

Francis Maddison

(Filed: 21/08/2006) Telegraph

Francis Maddison, who died on July 12 aged 78, was an
Arabist and an historian, and became Curator of Oxford's
Museum of the History of Science.

A taste for the recondite, a love of languages, a
delight in the bizarre or puzzling - these, allied to
careful and accurate scholarship were the characteristics
that led Maddison from his undergraduate studies in modern
languages and history to the direction of the world-class
collection of scientific and technical artefacts in Oxford.

Francis Romeril Maddison was was born at Hounslow on
July 27 1927, the elder son of Robert Edwin Witton Maddison,
an organist, research chemist and historian of science, and
of Adélaïde Romeril Verdier. Francis was educated at
Hounslow College and at Exeter College, Oxford, where he
took a degree in Modern History having switched from Modern
Languages.

Maddison was also fascinated by archaeology, and as
president of the university's archaeological society in 1948
he learned to cut flint in the palaeolithic manner from RJC
Atkinson, under whose supervision he directed excavations at
Cricklade and Dorchester.

He was a member of the British School at Rome
expedition to Leptis Magna, Tripolitana, in 1949, before
becoming assistant archivist, first at the Glamorgan County
Record Office, then in Warwickshire. While preparing an
exhibition about the Warwickshire county historian Sir
William Dugdale, he met CJ Josten, Curator of the Museum of
the History of Science, Oxford, who was collecting materials
for his monumental life of Elias Ashmole, Dugdale's
son-in-law.

Shortly afterwards, Josten encouraged Maddison to
accept the post of assistant curator in the Museum of the
History of Science rather than that of archivist to the
University Press. It was the beginning of a 40-year
association with the museum.

Crown among the many riches of the museum is the
collection of more than 100 astrolabes, the largest of its
kind in the world, and some two-thirds of which are
Arab-Islamic instruments. Maddison had already learnt the
rudiments of Arabic from his father, but he now extended his
command of the language while studying and re-displaying
these instruments.

The interdisciplinary nature of this material,
requiring skills in geometry, epigraphy and linguistics to
be combined with the historian's sense of context and
change, was perfectly suited to Maddison's delight in
variety and the resolving of puzzles. A stream of scholarly
papers in the late 1950s and 1960s resulted from this work,
and Maddison's expertise was increasingly in demand among
scholarly antiquarian book-sellers, such as Ernst Weill, and
the leading London auction-houses.

But Maddison's curiosity would not allow him to remain
within the limits of a single discipline, even one as one as
varied as his own. He extended his research interests into
the history of horology, time-measurement and early
techniques of navigation at sea. In later years he studied
Georgian and Armenian with his colleague and friend Charles
Dowsett, holder of the Callouste Gulbenkian chair in the
subject at Oxford.

In 1964 Maddison succeeded Josten as Curator of the
Museum of the History of Science, and from the early 1970s
collaborated with the Parisian antiquarian book-seller Alain
Brieux in a major epigraphical study of all the known works
of Arab-Islamic and Hindu mathematical instrument-makers.

Though never a prolific author, Maddison was generous
with his formidable learning, corresponding widely with
other scholars, sending notes and references likely to be of
help to them and encouraging them in their researches. As a
connoisseur he had a fine eye, immediately detecting, in the
early 1970s, a clever group of fake sun-dials and astrolabes
then appearing in the London sale-rooms. More
controversially he suggested that the "Tartar Relation"
text, associated with the spurious "Vinland Map", was also
not above suspicion.

With the core of Maddison's scholarly interests and
research lying in the Latin and Arabic Middle Ages, it was
natural that he should become president of the Society for
the History of Medieval Technology and Science when this was
founded in 1986, in part at the initiative of his friend
Jean Gimpel, a tireless proponent of the relevance of
medieval technology for the developing world. It was
natural, too, that Maddison should have played a pivotal
role in meetings of the Société Internationale de
l'Astrolabe, of which he was an honorary member.

Maddison was for several years chairman of the British
National Committee for the History of Science, Technology
and Medicine, presiding over the birth of the British
inventory of historic scientific instruments, part of the
world inventory orchestrated by the Unesco-dependent
International Union for the History and Philosophy of
Science. In 1978 he was elected a Fellow of the Society of
Antiquaries, and in 1983 to the International Academy of the
History of Science.

Mathematical and scientific instruments were
relatively neglected artefacts in the mid-1950s, their
technical nature upsetting art historians, their aesthetic
qualities linking them into worlds of craftsmanship and
patronage little understood by scientists. Descriptive
writing about them was far removed in quality from that
routinely deployed in the analysis of painting, sculpture or
even applied art objects.

Maddison combined his understanding of their many
aspects - their geometrical basis, the craft skills required
to execute them, the iconographic repertoire whence their
decoration derived, their historical contexts and
contingency - with precise and detailed descriptions. He
established new and rigorous standards for the presentation
of historic instruments in museum and exhibition catalogues,
and also for the description of such items in auction house
or private gallery catalogues aimed at the commercial art
market.

If, today, the history of scientific instruments is a
recognised sub-discipline of cultural history, rich in
detailed collection catalogues and wide-ranging histories,
it is in part a result of exemplary early catalogues such as
Maddison's Billmeier Collection Supplement (1957) slowly
permeating the field, and through his personal influence
spread via colleagues and pupils.

Crucial here was the seriousness of Maddison's
approach, one based on an unshakeable commitment to the
fascination of high scholarship, but one which Maddison none
the less succeeded in communicating as fun; because research
was fun it was to be shared, for thus it could provoke the
curiosity of others.

With his first wife, Audrey Kent, who died in 2004,
Francis Maddison had a daughter and a son. With his second
wife, Patricia Brown, who survives him, he had another son.