To investigate historical artifacts it can be helpful to use methods developed in museal contexts. This chapter introduces the methods and concepts that will be applied in Chapter  6 to the volvelles from the corpus of editions of Johannes de Sacrobosco’s Sphaera. As the volvelles are not images but rather instruments and can be manipulated, they were explored with the help of Edward McClung Fleming’s so called Winterthur model, in which an artifact’s five basic properties—history, material, construction, design, and function—are explored by following a workflow that consists of the operations identification, evaluation, cultural analysis, and interpretation. This methodology was used alongside Davis Baird’s concept of “Thing Knowledge.”