Chapter 1, ‘Of Scholars and Miners’, introduces the discipline of subterranean geometry from the point of view of Renaissance scholars. Early modern humanists were fascinated by the underground world of metal mines. The richness of the geometrical thinking contained in Georgius Agricola’s De re metallica (1556) or Erasmus Reinhold’s On Surveying (1574) is presented. By comparing them with actual productions of contemporary mine surveyors, I further show that these books, despite their lifelike descriptions and illustrations, did not limit themselves to straightforward, faithful depictions of actual practices. Early modern readers were presented with rational reconstructions and pseudo-technical procedures. In spite of a thorough knowledge and a genuine interest for the underground world, scholars mainly used their writings on mines in a patronage context, or to display their interpretation of Euclidean geometry.

Tacitus’ Germania is notable for its absences: lacking a preface and programmatic statements, and being the only ethnographic monograph to have survived from Greco-Roman antiquity, readers have often leapt to fill in its perceived blanks. This chapter aims at redressing the effects of overdetermined readings by interpreting the text’s absences as significant in their own right.