Despite a title which makes one think of the Mastermind specialist round during which you pop out to make a cup of tea, the latest temporary exhibition at Oxford University’s Museum of the History of Science, (MHS), Compass and Rule: Architecture as Mathematical Practice in England, 1500-1750, has, as usual, something for everybody.

You can visit it to learn in great scientific and historical detail about the ways in which new geometrical techniques influenced the development of architecture, or to study wonderful drawings by Christopher Wren (and, in a different league altogether, George III), or purely for the pleasure of seeing some charming maps, beautifully made mathematical instruments and fascinating manuscripts of the period.

The exhibition is a partnership between MHS and the Yale Centre for British Art in New Haven, USA, bringing together two disciplines — the histories of architecture and of science.

The curators, Anthony Gerbino — an architectural historian teaching at Worcester College — and MHS’s own Stephen Johnston, have been able to borrow items from many national institutions, including the British Museum, the Whipple (the Cambridge equivalent of MHS) and All Souls College, to whom many of the Wren drawings belong.

Laid out chronologically, the exhibition starts with a section on the skills of the medieval master masons, whose tools — the compass, set square and level displayed here — set the pattern for those of later centuries.

A piece of limestone inscribed with a design for a window in the 13th century chapel of the Hospital of St John the Evangelist, Cambridge, and then reused in its construction, emphasises that in this period builders tended to make it up as they went along, (not too different from a recent experience of my own, now I come to think of it!), using anything that came to hand for the purposes of illustration, since paper and parchment were expensive.

The drawing of part of Winchester College which is on show here, luckily preserved as a bookbinding, is Britain’s oldest known building plan, made around 1394.

This, and the survey of London plots in an enormous 15th century register of deeds in the same case, demonstrate that the point of drawing to scale was not yet appreciated.

It all changed in Henry VIII’s time, when the defence of the realm necessitated extensive new fortifications designed by his own engineers. Drawings and maps from the 1540s, based on accurate measurements in the field represented to scale, show military installations planned for Calais, Portsmouth and Hull.

The inclusion of seemingly irrelevant domestic detail, such as the smoking chimneys of numerous carefully sketched cottages, doubtless adds to the attraction of the plans for the modern viewer but it had a serious purpose apparently: to emphasise through contrast the strict militaristic lines of the proposed bulwarks.

Though the term ‘architect’ was not yet in common use in the 16th century, the Elizabethan John Symonds, whose portrait in oils hangs on one wall, was an example of a new sort of craftsman who could turn his hand to surveys, maps and building plans. He owned, and valued highly, several mathematical instruments, such as a ‘Geometricall square of latten [brass] for measureinge of lande’, which, alongside elements of his substantial wardrobe, formed some of the bequests in the lengthy Last Will and Testament which can be seen in the exhibition.

One of Symonds’ drawings, for Cursitors’ Hall in London (the clerical branch of the Court of Chancery), produced some time before 1579, shows how the three-dimensional possibilities of paper plans were being explored.

Separate sheets of paper represent each of three storeys, with a small lifting flap in the ground floor giving access to ‘A seller for Bere’ and another ‘for Wod and Coles’. At this time the old masons’ craft tools were being rapidly developed into mathematical instruments with much greater potential for map work and quantity surveying, as well as building measurement and design. The exhibition shows pages from an important and hugely popular book, Tectonicon (1556) by Leonard Digges, which defined the practice of mathematics in relation to building and surveying.

A folding rule by an early instrument maker, Humfrey Cole, and Elizabeth I’s lovely brass astrolabe, about 2ft in diameter, with a scale for measuring heights and distances, are two of the objects on display which date from this period of change.

The drawings by Sir Christopher Wren show how his interest in natural science, including astronomy and anatomy, and his increasing ability to visualise and depict its elements in three dimensions, became incorporated in an approach to the problems of architectural design.

Among the drawings of an ulcerated intestine (in glorious technicolour), proposals for the rebuilding of the Sheldonian and St Paul’s, and London itself after the Great Fire of 1666, I was moved (not an emotion I expected to experience at this exhibition) by the great man’s sketch of two hands clasped together, included to emphasise the point that Wren’s training was not that of an artist but that of an observer and recorder.

An interactive computer presentation allows visitors to manipulate Wren’s drawing of the transept of St Paul’s so that the flat plan, elevation, section and internal elevation are distinguished by different colours — the elevation can then be rotated into the vertical plane and extruded into 3D, which is good fun as well as enlightening.

A second option on the same menu helps with the interpretation of Wren’s drawing of the trajectory of a comet which appeared in 1664.

The exhibition continues with examples of mathematical instruments as they developed though the 17th and into the 18th century, with a section on George the Third’s patronage of architecture.

His highly ornate silver microscope indicates the importance of scientifically-based drawing as one of a number of civilised pursuits for gentlemen.

On the wall opposite George’s work, don’t miss Hogarth’s entertaining Five Orders of Perriwigs — a parody of the five orders of antiquity (Doric, Ionic etc.) to which, he felt, architects were over-devoted — or the response to it by an anonymous satirist.

Next to these, a 1768 print A Scene of a Pantamime Entertainment lately Exhibited signals the end of the great age of architecture and mathematics (and of the exhibition). It features the king’s architect holding one of the favourite instruments of the time, an architectonic sector — both are fading into the background.

Compass and Rule runs until September 6. There will be associated talks by the exhibition curators on August 18., September 1 and September 6. There will also be an associated curator-led walking tour of Oxford on September 2. The Museum of the History of Science, Broad Street, Oxford, OX1 3AZ. Open Tuesday to Friday, noon-5pm; Saturday, 10am-5pm; Sunday, 2-5pm. Admission free. For more information call 01865 277280