Great Review! Like Alexander, I also enjoyed the Shakespeare quote, though I admit a taste for The Tempest, The Taming of the Shrew, and Othello more than Twelfth Night.

You concisely touch on the authors arguments, and do a good job of summarizing the chronological development of navigation in early modern Europe. I very much enjoyed the text, I have a fascination with culture’s relationships with the ocean and the littoral, so this book was right up my alley. However, I am somewhat disappointed with the lack of any analysis on seafaring culture in the book. I may be mistaken, but I read the book as a history of the development of navigational methods in the early modern era, and less of a book about seafaring culture. I think the case-studies method (and the diverse approaches to teaching navigation) make this one of the few works we have read that does not delve too deeply into culture. I am somewhat disappointed by this, as I think the development navigation arts (or perhaps science) is a perfect example of the reconfiguration of western pedagogical method from one that was traditionally oral and skills based to one defined by classrooms and state-management. I thought it was fascinating seeing this cultural development play out in real time, with the mathematicians and other men of letters hired to head some of these navigation schools bouncing between traditional and print forms of learning navigation, ultimately deciding on a classroom format by the late 18c.

Also, I think the author could have spent more time discussing the distinction between navigation as an art, and navigation as a science. We see the development of a scientific pedagogical method in the work but don’t really get any glimpses at the negotiations these cultures must have had to turn a skill that resembled artisanship into the purview of rigorous method. I would have liked to see more of this kind of work in a book about early modern sailing.

Looking forward to the discussion!