This week's non-related reading: One of Our Thursdays is Missing

It's been too long since I read a books didn't have footnotes in it.  Ever since the semester ended, I've been trying something new-- instead of working on school-related stuff until I pretty much pass out from lack of sleep, this week, I've been spending my late evenings with Jasper Fforde's One of Our Thursdays is Missing. 


It's a book that probably will not be terribly enjoyable for people who haven't read the other works in the series (which I urge everyone to do.  Go on, I'll wait. *surfs the Internet.  Makes a cake. Writes the next great American novel.  Does dishes.* OK, all done?  Good).  It's also a bit slower than the other books in the series, and the jokes seem a bit more forced this time around, but Fforde is a wonderful author, so even on a less-than-stellar book, the result is chuckle-worthy, even if it's not the same ohmygodicannotgotosleepuntilifinishthisbook that The Eyre Affair was.


The premise is, not terribly surprising, that Thursday Next, or, rather, a Thursday Next has gone missing, and another Thursday has to go and both find her, and find out why she's missing (though not in that order).  In the mean time, written Thursday meets up with a clockwork butler, an elephant with a long memory, a Designated Love Interest, and Unrequited Love Interest, and others.  Hijinks (formulaically) ensue.  Lessons are told, consequences are suffered, and everyone who was meant to lives happily ever after.


Not the best book in the world, and I doubt that I would have finished it if I hadn't had the great love of Fforde that I do.  But it did provide a nice counterbalance to reading about sodomy in early modern Italy, which was today's related reading.  I think I giggled more at the latter, but that's just because I am immature.

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.  

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. 

Review: Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud

In Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Laqueur argues that like sex (much like gender) has been invented and reinvented in response to an age’s particular social and cultural norms, and was not a result of scientific advances.  He argues that over the course of medical history, there had been a shift from the one-sex model, where there was just one sex, and that differences between males and females were differences in degree, and not of kind, to a two-sex model.  The one-sex model was, according to him, surprisingly long-lived because differences between men and women were externally accorded to different sexes, and not thought to be a function of a completely different body.  Also, he argues that sex was linked to power, and man, at that time, was in all aspects really the measure of all things, including bodies, female and otherwise.  The further argues that this was a point corroborated by the great sixteenth and seventeenth century anatomists—their representations of male and female genitalia as simply inverted versions of one another were correct in that they represented what these anatomists thought they saw, because representations are dependent on cultural ideas, and not necessarily on empirical evidence.

Around 1750, he goes on to say, sex was invented.  The one-sex model was transformed into the two-sex model that states that men and women have different bodies and different characteristics that are a direct result of these two fundamentally different types of bodies (though, the one sex model lived on in the cultural imagination up to the present day).  Again, he argues that this change was not due to advances in medical theory, but a result of a changing social, political, and cultural context.  The differentiation (or not) between two sexes was never due to biology or what the status of medicine was at any particular time, but to “the rhetorical exigencies of the moment.”  In the end, he argues, sex is an artifice, and always has been.

The problem, however, is that Lacquer grossly simplifies the matter.  His one-sex model, especially, picks and chooses ideas from various philosophers and medical figures, and in the end, the patchwork he creates samples many, but adequately explains nothing.  His book represents an elaborate attempt to demonstrate that attitudes about a person’s sex have changed over time, and that they have changed as the result of cultural and social factors, rather than strictly scientific ones.  In this, he follows the work of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, but on a more specific level, he argues that, in opposition to Foucault’s idea that one episteme overtook and completely supplanted another, ideas of the one-sex model lived on, even in a two-sex model world.  And it is at the level of this specific argument that the book ends up woefully unconvincing.  Lacquer seemed so intent on adducing evidence for his thesis that he artificially imposes an order on pre-eighteenth century medical thought (that, in itself is problematic—any argument that purports to explain a swath of time from Aristotle to the French Revolution automatically raises red flags) that simply was not there.   The book is provocative, to be sure.  But the argument, woefully, is simply inaccurate.