Quotation of the day

Or, in which I discover the visually pleasing qualities of a human navel... 


"History, that is, a rehearsal of the events of human tragedy. [...] Words cannot do sufficient justice to the importance of this. [...] For the study of human history makes men gentle, humble, and careful, so the ignorance of it keeps him crude toward himself and others, proud, and hasty towards his own and the state's undoing."

From Johann Valentin Andreae's Chrisianopolis (1616)

catalog reading

I came across an entry in a catalog for a book with, as early modern books are wont to have, a really long title.  The title in the Worldcat citation is Iobi Ludolfi aliàs Leut=holf dicti Historia Aethiopica: sive brevis & succincta descriptio regni Habessinorum, quod vulgò malè Presbyteri Iohannis vocatur : in qua libris quatuor agitur ... : cum tabulâ capitum, & indicibus necessariis, which is more than a mouthful.  Who was it that said that his mouth felt as if a mouse had pissed in it, then died?  At any rate, no doubt that's how I'd feel if I tried to declaim that title.

What really drew me to the book, however, was the description for the illustrations noted in the catalog I was consulting. To wit:

Map - Ethiopia. Banana. Sheep. Elephants. Monkeys. Hippopotamus. Execution - Beheading of missionaries.

Where else can you get a banana, elephant, and a beheading, all in one, convenient seventeenth century package?  

Review: Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution

Moran, Bruce T. Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

The work is, by its nature, an introductory work, aimed more for students or general readers wishing to get a crash course in European alchemy during the Scientific Revolution, but also interestingly, Moran’s chronology reaches into the in the Middle Ages, because of course, alchemy did not spring, fully formed and articulated, in the early modern period.  Despite its brevity, it must be noted that it fulfills its aims quite well.  It is a short, compact, but adept little book that discusses the conceptual framework and development of alchemy in the sixteenth and seventeenth century.  While its format is that of the standard textbook in history of science, its argument takes into account several interesting features that have been coming out of the scholarship in the Scientific Revolution over the past decade or so.  Eschewing the grand narrative of the Scientific Revolution (in which alchemy is vilified as the exemplar of the irrationality of premodern knowledge), and even a more nuanced argument that alchemy is important because certain alchemical principles would become important for later chemists, he instead argues for the centrality of alchemical practice in a new sort of Scientific Revolution, one that was not a revolution of ideas, but a revolution in the way artisanal practices were viewed.  In this, Moran’s work is very similar to a recent work by Pamela Long, Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, which also argues that if we begin to look at physical processes, practical experiences, and the physical process of doing, then we see the story of the Scientific Revolution in a new light. 

The book begins with a description of the many things that doing alchemy *meant* in the early modern period, and the second chapter stresses the links that alchemical practices had to the various artisanal practices of the day.  The third chapter treats Paracelsus, the iconoclast physician without whom no treatment of alchemy is complete.  The fourth chapter looks at the places where alchemical and chemical learning was done.  The Paracelsians had long laid claim to the courts of German princes, and Philip II had also created an alchemical laboratory in his own court, and was a great patron of Paracelsian doctors and apothecaries. Attempts were also made, Moran writes, to secure a place for chemical knowledge within academic walls, and the tradition of teaching it at the university began in early seventeenth century Paris, and spread to other sites of early modern knowledge-making like the Jardin des Plantes.  Chapter 5 brings us into the world of apparatuses and experiences beyond the ken of those who worked only in the environments that nature provided.  Hooke and Boyle’s air pump, for example, gave new sites of knowledge-making, including alchemical knowledge.  The chapter also goes on to talk about Boyle’s major work, the Scepitcal Chemist, and the views on alchemy and chemistry it contained.  His main aim in the book, Moran writes, was to attack the claims of those who, without experimental justification assumed the presence of principles and elements to use in their chemical philosophies, taking direct aim, or course, at Aristotle’s four elements, and Paracelsus’ three principles of mercury, salt, and sulfur.  What Boyle replaced these elements and principles with was buts of matter in motion, obeying the laws of god and nature.  Boyle, like Bacon and Starkey, displayed a skeptical empiricism, and a desire to make knowledge through experiment, a newly forming category of the time.  The discussion of alchemy as a discipline that crossed traditional boundaries is the subject of the final chapter. Alchemy, he argues, crossed national borders, and was at home in the courts as well as in the academies.  Alchemists worked to support the mechanical view of life, while other alchemists balanced these discussions with arguments for the presence of vitalistic principles. He uses that to stress his view of the Scientific Revolution not as a story of opposites, with one aspect of a pair triumphing over another, but to look at the congruences between them, be they between mechanism and vitalism, or alchemy and mechanics. In this way, he argues, we can see how the process of making things can share a role in the process of creating scientific knowledge. To this end, he discuses the contribution of chemistry and mechanics to medicine, and (following in the footsteps of Betty Jo Dobbs’ The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy) Newton’s alchemical practices, which Newton took very seriously.

Moran concludes with the usual story of reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution:  alchemy and chemistry. were important, even before they were quantitative; modern categories of ‘rational’ and ‘scientific’ have little bearing in the early modern world, and there was more of a continuity than a displacement in the move from alchemy to chemistry during the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  His overall point, reiterated in the conclusion, is that hands-on practices themselves were forms of making knowledge, and that these activities should be afforded a place, alongside discoveries and theories, in the now-traditional narrative of the so-called Scientific Revolution.  

things I don't like

Snow.  Snow is something I really don't care for.  And the cold.  Is it summer yet?

quotation of the day: on paradigms

"... only with great difficulty could [Kuhn] have left the concept of 'paradigm' more open to misinterpretation than he did.  One sympathetic critic has shown that Kuhn uses the tem in no fewer than 21 different ways." - Cedarbaum, "Paradigms"


Every time I hear the word 'paradigm,' I remember my old PI, incensed that the lab's work wasn't getting into the best journals, when everyone should be able to see that it was paradigm shifting, or that it would start a new paradigm, paradigm, paradigm.  I suspected paradigm was his favorite word. 

quotations from Trevor-Roper

In the section refuting the notion that Calvinism was responsible for the Enlightenment, we get a lot of choice tidbits about Calvinists from a man who certainly knew how to wield a pen. On the Calvinist torch-bearers of the 17th c:

Their masters may have been grim, but there is a certain heroic quality about their grimness, a literary power about their writing, an intellectual force in their minds. The successors are also grim, but they are grim and mean. Perkins and ‘‘Smectymnuus’’ in England, Rivetus and Voëtius in Holland, Baillie and Rutherford in Scotland, Desmarets and Jurieu in France, Francis Turrettini in Switzerland, Cotton Mather in America—what a gallery of intolerant bigots, narrow-minded martinets, timid conservative defenders of repellent dogmas, instant assailants of every new or liberal idea, inquisitors and witch-burners!

On Calvinism in France:

But after 1629, when the pride and autonomy of the Huguenots were broken, the independent laymen gradually disappear from among them, and French Protestantism, like Scottish Protestantism, is dominated by a clergy which becomes, with time, increasingly narrow and rigid: crabbed prudes and Puritans, haters of literature and the arts, stuck in postures of defence. 

On radicalism (or not):

In general we are too prone to suppose that the Independency of the Puritan Republic was intellectually a radical movement. Once again this results from a confusion of political with intellectual terms. Because the Independents, the Cromwellians, were prepared to cut off the king’s head, while the Presbyterians, the followers of Denzil Holles, wished to keep it on, it is easy to suppose that the former were more ‘‘radical’’ than the latter.

Word of the Day: lampadophory

Camaraderie is a wonderful thing, I suppose.  I was reading Hugh Trevor-Roper's The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (which is available for free from the wonderful folks at the Online Library of Liberty), and I came across an unfamiliar word: lampadophory.  I used the not-so-trusty-but-incredibly-handy Oxford New American dictionary on my computer.  Not terribly surprisingly, it was not there.  So, I googled it, but while I was waiting for the page to load, I realized my folly-- why bother to google it, I *know* that I'm going to look it up in the OED, no matter what I find on the internet.  But, in a strange coincidence, the first hit for the word was this blog post that was about the process of reading Trevor-Roper in the library, and wondering what this strange word meant.  Well, I now know that I am not the only one who stumbled on this particular word!

Oh, and for all the people who might stumble on this page while looking up 'lampadophory' while they too are reading Trevor-Roper, the word comes from the Greek lampadedromy:

A torch-race; a race (on foot or horseback) in which a lighted torch was passed from hand to hand.

There, saved you a trip.

quotation of the day

“I also met at Gorice a Count Cotonimi, who was known in learned circles as the author of some Latin treatises on diplomacy.  Nobody read his books, but everyone agreed that he was a very learned man.” - Casanova, Memoirs, VI

Reading Latour "Matters of Fact, Matters of Concern"

And the best quotation of the night is the following:

‎The problem with philosophers is that because their jobs are so hard they drink a lot of coffee and thus use in their arguments an inordinate quantity of pots, mugs, and jugs-- to which, sometimes, they might add the occasional rock.

I'm no philosopher, but I do appreciate a profession that requires drinking a lot of coffee (or throwing rocks at relativists, also a good use for a rock).


Another notable tidbit:

Do you see now why it feels so good to be a critical mind? ...You are always right! ... Isn't this fabulous!  Isn't it really worth going to graduate school to study critique!  'Enter here, poor folks.  After arduous years of reading turgid prose, you will always be right, you will never be taken in any more; no one, no matter how powerful, will be able to accuse you of naïveté, that supreme sin, any longer.

I do like the sound of always being right.  I don't like the reading turgid prose part though.... Can't I always be right, and leave the purple prose to the professionals?

Cardano's Cosmos Review

Grafton, Anthony. Cardano’s Cosmos: the Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

The world will end in 2012.  So it is foretold in the stars— on 21 December of 2012, the December sun will line up with the plane of the Milky Way on the winter solstice with disastrous consequences for life on earth.  Or, at least, that’s what some believe.  Claims like these, and the astronomical data that buttress them, are mostly met with scorn or amusement today, but they were no laughing matter in the sixteenth century.  Anthony Grafton’s marvelous work on the life and works of Girolamo Cardano—a true Johannes-of-all-trades—explores the study of sixteenth century astrology with great sensitivity to the notion that this was very serious stuff indeed for Cardano and his contemporaries.  Despite the central importance that the stars had in the lives of sixteenth century men and women, there have been (or at least in 1999, there had been) precious few studies that took astrology as their contemporaries did, as a serious, empirical science.  Cardano, Grafton tells us, is an excellent choice to bridge the gap between two different historical interpretations of astrology: the first treats the subject on a social and cultural level, the second dwelled in the more internal, nitty-gritty world of endless calculations. The former usually could not find its way around a deferent, much less the complicated computations that went into a geniture, but the latter often could not dwell in the complicated social reality that made these astrological predictions so crucial in the first place.  Never before had the twain met, but these two roads of inquiry converge at Cardano; at a place where his writings and commentaries upon them abound. 

In Cardano’s Cosmos, Grafton recreates the world and the works of a typical sixteenth century astrologer—and we have no reason to doubt that Cardano was anything but typical (even if his store of writings and personal introspection was certainly unusual).   The book also goes into great detail about Cardano’s biography, and traces his published works from his first treatise on astrology, the 1534 Prognostico, the 1538 Libelli duo, and in the last chapter, Cardano’s own autobiography.  In chasing down Cardano’s life and astrological practices, Grafton shows how the man’s astrological prognostications were the end result of a system of knowledge that was both highly empirical and critical, and was indispensable for a Renaissance man or woman’s understanding of their world and themselves.

The work also touches upon several aspects of importance to early modern history.  It adds an interesting addendum to the already voluminous chapter of the rise of print culture, since Cardano exploited the new media to disseminate his ideas, and he in effect made his career by bringing into print a realm of materials that had only been in the manuscript tradition before.  However, Grafton is quick to point out that this is not a story of the triumph of print over manuscript, but that even in the post-Gutenberg west, the manuscript tradition was alive and well, and in fact, the first few printed horoscope collections were of far inferior quality and low technical level.  While print quickly became the preferred media for things like almanacs and astronomical tables, the media for horoscopes, which were so personal, and so dependent upon interpersonal connections, remained the manuscript and the conversation, but they were but one example out of many of texts whose manuscript forms remained standard until well after the advent of print.  The work also maps the place of the astrologer in late Renaissance society, and the perils and pitfalls that concerned anyone offering advice in a world of politics, fickle patrons, and great rivalry between practitioners. 

Astrology, Grafton writes, was an art that had persisted over centuries, but the application of tools of the trade “depended on the changing needs and situations of their users and their clients and readers” (198).  Astrology, then, as now, has always had its critics.  In the sixteenth century, the specter of Pico della Mirandola’s debunking of the origin myths of astrology hung over the whole enterprise, yet it lived on; Cardano is a testament to that.  But, he also participated in the humanistic endeavor to reform astrology, but his reformation took on the two-pronged approach typical of medical humanists of the day.  He sought to re-examining the ancient sources, and attempting to recreate the Imperial astrology which Ptolemy based his Tetrabiblos on, but he also collected new genitures and subjected them to minute scrutiny in hopes of reforming the practice through his own observations.  Grafton stresses that, when looked at in its social, political, and intellectual context, astrology was not simply superstitious hokum, but a system of knowledge of the most empirical sort. Cardano’s Cosmos brings to light this interesting chapter in the history of early modern science, and steers the reader on an intriguing journey in the life and times of a supremely fascinating man.