The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626-1660 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 89 Exploration"; Maristella de Panizza Lorch, "Voluptas. molle quodam et non invidiosum nomen: Lorenzo Valla's Defense of voluptas in the Preface to his De voluptate"; Neal W. Gilbert, "Richard de Bury and the 'Quires of Yesterday's Sophisms'"; John Herman Randall, Jr., "Paduan Aristotelianism Reconsidered"; William F. Edwards, "Niccol6 Leoniceo and the Origins of Humanist Discussion of Method"; and Charles B. Schmitt, "Girolomo Borro's Multae sunt nostrarum ignorationum causae (Ms. Vat. Ross. 1009)." There are, besides, a number of essays on Renaissance literature, as well as pieces on politics, economics, science, and mathematics. Several present hitherto unpublished texts. All are learned, and many contribute substantially to our understanding of the age. Students of Renaissance literature will be especially interested in Richard Harrier's "Invention in Tudor Literature: Historical Perspectives," which proposes a new, or rather an older, way of understanding English Renaissance literature in the light of Renaissance rhetoric. But the highest praise of all is due to the volume's editor, Edward P. Mahoney. A disciple of Kristeller, he has, besides assembling and editing the individual pieces, contributed an informative and sympathetic account of "Paul Kristeller and His Contribution to Scholarship" and a "Bibliography of the Publications of Paul Oskar Kristeller for the Years 1929-1974." This last constitutes an invaluable instrument de travail for Renaissance studies. It lists one hundred forty-nine "major" and two hundred twenty-six "minor" items. It also tells where articles appear elsewhere as book chapters, notes any revisions, and indicates where and when pieces were read as scholarly papers. The bibliography is fully cross referenced. The volume's usefulness is multiplied by a thirty-one page index. Indeed, so exact and so helpful is the editing of Philosophy and Humanism that one might almost think it had come from Professor Kristeller's own hand. All those who love scholarship and humane learning rejoice in its publication. JAMESA. DEVEREUX,S.J. University of North Carolina. Chapel Hill Charles Webster. The Great lnstauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626-1660. New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1976. Pp. xvi + 630. $29.50. Were the reader grown accustomed to the word science in George Sarton's extraordinary Introduction to the Hislory of Science to take the subtitle of Webster's fine work in the same sense, he would soon be chanting a litany of complaints against many of the"omissions and inclusions in the latter volume. Both the geographic scope and the general temper of the two books are very different, though broadly their subject matters have much in common, regardless of the fact that Sarton's account comes to an end more than 200 years before Webster's begins. Sarton thinks of science as blanketing, at first lightly, then thickly, the entire planet, and he seeks to show that there are hardly any nations not contributing at least a small portion to the great fabric of communicated thoughts and formulations having scientific or technologic value. For his part Webster refers very little to any country beyond the British Isles--and even the Scots and the Irish come in for little attention. Although many of the prominent seventeenth -century English doctors received a good part of their medical training in Bologna, Padua, and elsewhere on the Continent, Webster scarcely alludes to Fabricius, Columbus, Par6, Fallopius, or to most of the others who counted for so much in the generation just older than that of William Harvey. He is conscious, it is true, of the "taste for continental medical education" (p. 122), but the habit of stepping across boundaries, as Sarton does, or as H. T. Pledge does on a much smaller scale in his helpful Science Since 1500, is exterior to Webster's effort. This is also true of the way he deals with the mathematical sciences, physics, and the logic of science as well. Bacon receives a column and a half of references in the index to the book, Descartes about a quarter of a column, and his distinguished countrymen even less. 90 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY (Because of the character of the book, the references are so scattered throughout that it would be wasteful to refer here to pages or sections. It...