The 2018-19 Marston LaFrance Research Fellowship has been awarded to Professor W. R. Laird to complete the writing of his book The Renaissance of Mechanics. This book will be the first book-length, synthetic account of the rise of mechanics in the sixteenth century. After a thorough and in many ways a new assessment of the ancient and medieval mechanical traditions, it will trace the recovery by renaissance humanists and mathematicians of ancient mechanical and technological works largely unknown in the Middle Ages, their assimilation into the medieval tradition of the science of weights, and their transformation into a new mathematical science of mechanics as the theory of machines. The culmination of this process was the mechanical work of Galileo, who, once he had established mechanics on secure mathematical and natural foundations, used its results as the grounds of his new science of motion. Through the following century, mechanics (in the narrower sense of the theory of machines) would be merged with Galileo’s science of motion to become the modern science of mechanics, concerned in general with motions and forces. Mechanics in this broader sense came to consider nature and all its works in mechanical terms. The argument of the book, then, is how the recovery and transformation of ancient mechanical texts in the sixteenth century prepared the way for the mechanical philosophy of the seventeenth century.