Imagining the Sciences: Expressions of New Knowledge in the "Long" Eighteenth Century (review)

This collection of essays contains a foreword and nine chapters, each by a different author. It is the fruit of the first conference held at the Noel Collection of the Noel Memorial Library in Shreveport, Louisiana, which took place in November 2001. The book is divided into three sections: "The Theater of Science," "The Dramatis Personae of Science," and "The Scripts of Science." According to the editors, this collection attempts "to encourage a new approach to understanding science during the 'long' eighteenth century and for that matter into our own day," by looking "at the way in which the sciences as a whole were figured, prefigured, and refigured by early modern and Enlightenment practitioners, and at the way that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers portrayed science and its promises, both to themselves and to the public" (xi). The volume is thus "principally concerned with the imaging and understanding of the sciences themselves, with the way in which scientists saw science and concomitantly with the many colourful pursuits that resulted from this interest in science as a discipline, art, way of life, and hope for the future" (xi).

As this summary of intentions suggests, the theme of this collection is not a new one. Moreover, the editors and many of the contributors fail to bring to their work a sophisticated understanding of what it might mean to talk about "science" and "scientists" in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The concern with the appearance of the sciences that the editors highlight is one whose omnivorous quality allows some fairly mediocre contributions to slip through.

In what is a tough competition, the palm for misrepresentation and misunderstanding is carried off by one of the editors, Kevin L. Cope, whose lengthy essay concerns "Elastic Empiricism, Interplanetary Excursions, and the Description of the Unseen: Henry More's Cosmos, John Hutton's Caves, and George Friedrich Meier's Quips." Cope believes that More (1614–1687), whose Platonism was extremely unusual and whose poetic engagement with philosophical topics in Spenserian verse was hardly typical even in his own corpus of scientific writing, "is highly representative" and a "pop scientist" (113–14). He also asserts that More's work embodied "empiricism" in its more colloquial, more literary meaning, as an experientialist mentality influencing many aspects of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century culture (110), although the historical Henry More was a frequent critic of advocates of experiment (itself presumably a form of empiricism). But then Cope's Henry More was not the Cambridge Platonist and author of philosophical poetry who lived in Christ's College at a time of intense religious and political upheaval, but someone "whose overfilled research schedule once led him to remain in uninterrupted cogitation for an entire year in his Oxford study room" (115)! This exercise in the creation of a historical parallel universe to the real seventeenth century is echoed by both the other contributions to part one of the volume, which abound in error and misreading. Similar depths are plumbed in other sections, for instance by George Sebastian Rousseau's imaginative discussion of "The Consumption of Meat in an Age of Materialism." Rousseau's claims about a long-running English predilection for eating raw beef are based on the comments of a few eighteenth-century travelers and foreign observers, and on the views of two mid-twentieth-century Frenchmen. They fly in the teeth of the evidence for change and variety provided by contemporary recipe books and by the research of modern demographers and historians of diet. Equally, Rousseau's apparent belief that bad dentition in eighteenth-century England was a product of the mastication of raw meat seems to neglect the rapid growth in the consumption of sugar from the mid-seventeenth century onward. It would be nice to say that the many illustrations in the volume at least provide some relief for the reader, and some evidence of early modern attitudes...