Isaac Newton, Master of Print

In his The Life of Sir Isaac Newton (1728), French intellectual Bernard de Fontenelle commented that "it requir'd some time before the Publick could understand" Newton's mathematical masterpiece the Principia when the first edition was published in 1687. The book Newton had written was filled "with a great deal of learning," but "the author has been vary sparing of his Words" and "Great Mathematicians were oblig'd to study it with care; the middling Ones did not attempt it."¹ While Fontenelle was not the first to view the Principia as an exceedingly difficult book to read, his assessment did contribute to the near mythological status of the impenetrable contents of a book that became more admired than it was read, let alone understood. Nineteenth-century biographers of Newton went further in their characterization of the Principia. J. B. Biot claimed that "when it was first published, not more than two or three among Newton's contemporaries were capable of understanding it."² Augustus De Morgan suggested that it "would be difficult to name a dozen men in Europe of whom, at the appearance of the Principia, it can be proved that they both read and understood the work."³ Given these early assessments, it is not surprising that the historical process of transforming the ideas within Newton's mind to the printed page and then into the collective consciousness of the age continues to serve as the inspiration for studies of science publishing and the history of the book. It is within this conversation that Laura Miller positions her book Reading Popular Newtonianism: Print, the Principia, and the Dissemination of Newtonian Science (Charlottesville, 2018).

Miller writes that her purpose is to show how the Principia "responded to extant print practices and extant disciplinary standards of truth, using those precepts to create a template that ultimately facilitated [Newton's] popularization" (6). In order to do this, she centers her "analysis on visual, networked, and technological representations of Newton's work through evaluating print, editing practices, and reception history" (6). As should be evident, this is a book that attempts to weave history of science within the fabric of literary history.

Despite Miller's efforts to bridge these two disciplines, there is a marked difference in the way Reading Popular Newtonianism has been received by academics. On the one hand, a recent review by a historian of science, a Newton expert, called the book "unconvincing" and "riddled with factual errors," stating that it does a "disservice" to Newtonian scholarship.⁴ On the other hand, an English scholar's review praised the book as "an important contribution to a number of critical fields" that was "expertly presented, and exhaustively researched."⁵ This dichotomy of opinion reflects what I found to be the biggest problem with Miller's book. In order to successfully accomplish what she promises to do in the introduction, Miller needed to demonstrate mastery of Newtonian scholarship to the same degree that she demonstrates facility with literary scholarship. That she did not is evident throughout the book's early pages.

In the first two chapters, Miller builds her case that Newton consciously and carefully constructed the Principia with different levels of meaning and thereby made available different levels of understanding to his audience. In her words, "Newton manipulated common print conventions to make the Principia superficially accessible to a range of reading levels, attracting even inexpert readers to complex ideas that were presented with clarity in Latin prose" (13). She links Newton's strategy of safeguarding his reputation as crafted by the Principia to his own reading of classical authors and his theological writings. Here, though, Miller's examination is undermined by misidentifying early-church theologian Arius as Arsenius (20–21). She does not consider that Newton's reluctance to publicity was due more to his personal heretical anti-Trinitarian beliefs than his attempt to emulate the actions of fourth-century churchmen described in their epistles. Indeed, Newton's unorthodox theology is conspicuously absent in much of the discussion. Miller's reading of Newton's "General Scholium" is an area in which her interpretation is incongruent with...