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212 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 and craftsmen=s solidarity was a more burning question then than now. Detailed expositions of constitutions of small craft groups should appear in footnotes if at all. The book is partly scholarly monograph and partly general text, meaning neither constituency will enjoy every page. There=s gender trouble here too. Moogk paints families as subject to stern patriarchs who supposedly considered open expression of affection to their children unmanly, but even in the case cited, the father makes his warm heart clear. Women are >dependents= who >bore the weight= of preserving marriages; widows >must remarry for support.= Yet, as French historian J.M . Gouesse noted in his study of Normandy, both sexes were dependent: >One must be married to live,= for the couple was the basic working unit. Women tended dairy and garden, made candles, bread, soap, cloth, and clothes. Unlike Victorian times, when vast increase of capital allowed a large leisured class, women of all ranks worked alongside their husbands in farmsteads, shops, taverns, trading posts; at the upper end they administered households and sought patronage just as their husbands did. All European societies from classical times were patriarchal. What is of interest is the relative opportunity women enjoyed. Moogk ignores the consensus that women fared relatively well under the Coutume (which for example rejected primogenture and endowed habitant children of both sexes), and conflates it with the androcentric Napoleonic code. Painting with too broad a brush obscures differences between the ancien régime and the Victorians. The book ends with a delightfully rich chapter on religion and magic. Here the author=s wealth of anecdote and his familiarity with transatlantic scholarship such as the work of Keith Thomas give real insight into rituals used to ward off everything from impotence to insect infestations. The packs of cards placed under the altar cloths and observations about why French swearing is religious rather than scatological linger in the mind as ways people living in the shadow of plague, war, and devastating Conquest dealt with the unknown. Clearly some powerful force kept that vibrant culture alive. La Nouvelle France captures some of the magic. (JAN NOEL) Fred Wilson. The Logic and Methodology of Science in Early Modern Thought: Seven Studies University of Toronto Press 1999. xiii, 608. $95.00 This very long book by University of Toronto professor of philosophy Fred Wilson sets out to defend a traditional thesis. It was always assumed that the scientific revolution constituted a genuine break with the thought of the past. Up to the seventeenth century the way that people thought about science was much influenced by the ancients B Plato to some extent, and Aristotle particularly in the medieval period. At the time of the scientific HUMANITIES 213 revolution, the whole Aristotelian way of thinking was thrown out and a new empirical approach to nature was developed by such great scientists as Newton, and such great philosophers as Locke and Hume. However, as Wilson notes, in recent years this traditional picture has come under strong attack. Historians of physics, notably I.B. Cohen at Harvard, and the late Thomas Kuhn, the author of the Copernican Revolution, have argued that in fact modern science shows much continuity with the ancient ways of thinking, and that the scientific revolution, while significant, was far less revolutionary than its practitioners suggested. It is Wilson=s contention that the new thinkers are simply wrong, and that one must return to an older way of thinking: I am convinced, then, that something like the traditional story about the emergence of the new science in the early modern period is true. Before that time, there was something that could be called Aristotelianism. This was not science but metaphysics. Then people such as Galileo and Harvey discovered the new science; they set about doing it. Bacon and Descartes proposed methods for the new science. Bacon=s inductive method triumphed in the context of the empiricist critique of both the Aristotelians and the rationalists. What emerged was an account of being and an account of reason that were very different indeed from those of the medieval period and from those of the rationalists who continued parts of the...

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