A crooked path.
This is a printed version of Pamela O. Long's talk at the 2014 Society for the History of Technology annual meeting, on the occasion of receiving the Leonardo da Vinci award. It provides a synoptic intellectual autobiography of the author, treating the development of her work on Vitruvianism, ideas concerning contextualism, some of the scholars that have most influenced her work, and her present project on engineering in sixteenth-century Rome.