Book Review

Methods/Theory

This collection originated in a seminar held by the Cambridge University Historiography Group. Twenty essays, representing recent work, were commissioned and edited by Marina Frasca-Spada and Nick Jardine. They are grouped under three catch-all headings and loosely arranged in chronological order, beginning with the medieval era and ending in the mid-nineteenth century. An editorial introduction notes that both the history of science and book history have recently taken parallel paths away from concern with "canonical authors and elite reception" toward surveying "the full range of writings and readership." In keeping with this trend, the readers and writers of major works (by Nicolaus Copernicus, Andreas Vesalius, Isaac Newton, et al.) are passed over; commentaries, compendia, and popularizations loom large; the so-called "hard" sciences receive less attention than do astrology and alchemy. The editors also reject recent "grand pronouncements about the impact of print on the sciences" citing the work of this reviewer as a case in point. They regard it as "misleading" to consider "manuscript, print and electronic communication as media which variously facilitate or hinder the growth of knowledge" (p. 3).

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Why this is misleading is not made clear. In the only essay on developments before printing, Rosamund McKitterick notes that medieval craftsmen had to rely on oral transmission to pass on their "fund of empirical knowledge of such subjects as mathematics, acoustics and chemistry" (p. 30). (Did medieval craftsmen really cultivate such advanced subjects?) She also asserts that "the pattern of . . . oral and written transmission of knowledge established in the early middle ages has remained substantially the same ever since" (p. 26). The idea that the balance between oral and written has gone unchanged since the days of Charlemagne strikes me as bizarre. So does Silvia De Renzi's comment, in a later essay, that "the appeal of orality as an antidote to bookish and stale knowledge led Galileo to write dialogues" (p. 163).

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