Book Reviews

The book Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England by Dr. Elaine Leong presents the accumulation of household scientific knowledge by using family recipe manuscripts to show how families accumulated knowledge and tested it. Throughout the first five chapters of Recipes and Everyday Knowledge, Leong uses a number of recipe manuscripts, acquired mainly from archival research, with the Wellcome Library being a significant source of information, as sources to provide case studies that show how upper-class society compiled information and tested it in a scientific way. In the final chapter, Leong adds the use of printed recipe books and home manuscripts to show how families used these printed versions similarly to the use of family manuscripts. This source pool focuses only on English manuscripts and print works, which skews the information and practices toward what was done in England, but it also helps the relatively narrow scope of the book. It also provides an interesting source for the book since the writings come from both male and female actors, countering the idea that the recipe collection process was seen as solely part of the female sphere.

Leong works at University College as a history lecturer and achieved her doctorate in philosophy at the University of Oxford. The book Recipes and Everyday Knowledge also received the 2019 Margaret W. Rossiter Prize from the History of Science Society, showing the high quality of this book on the topic of women in scientific history. She is currently working on a book project called Reading Rivière in Early Modern England, which also studies knowledge production, maintenance, and transfer. Because of this focus in her scholarship, Leong represents a strong author to write a history that focuses largely on knowledge production and transfer.

The main argument of this book is that studying the recipe books of 17th-century households shows the broad connections of the knowledge-making community and represents another process of knowledge-making in this period. To do this, Leong separates the book into four main sections, which explain the social aspect of making these manuscripts, the process of testing them, and how the knowledge was passed on, with the final chapter moving away from the household manuscript to the published recipe books. These chapters are mostly formatted with case studies making up most of the content. The case study format allows the author to show how the families, not scientists as we know them, collected and tested medical knowledge through experiments with the recipes. This information allows Leong to successfully that the house during this period was an important place for the generation of knowledge.

The first significant section of this book is chapters one and two present the social connections in creating these recipe books. This section shows how the collection and spreading of knowledge in recipe books was an essential part of both social relations and patronage at this time. This section shows the cultural importance of a family collecting information for their family book and how that information was spread between families. This process represents a cultural phenomenon similar to and part of patronage since it represents part of the gift-giving culture and the culture of favors created by sharing these recipes. By showing the collection process, these chapters set up the testing shown in the following chapters and show the gathering of knowledge done by a family.

The middle two chapters of the book, chapters three and four, present how the knowledge gathered for these books was tested and verified. The middle chapters represent an essential part of the book’s argument because they show how families proved the recipes collected by the process of the previous section. These chapters present how the authors of these family collections verified the information they took in and put varying levels of effort into recipes from more or less important people. This section, more than others, presents how the creators of family books experimented with the recipes they gathered. By doing this, the author expands on the process of knowledge collection that existed in the books period.

The final section based solely on recipe manuscripts is chapter 5, which explains how knowledge was passed on through these books. This chapter of the book felt out of place when moving from the previous to chapter five, as the book changes from use and collection to the passing on of these works to descendants. But even though the move between chapters felt odd as a change in the topic, it represented an important part of the book’s larger argument. This is because this chapter showed how “the younger generation … placed great value on the family book.” (p. 145) By showing the importance of passing on knowledge with the family books, Leong supports the idea of the cultural importance of knowledge collection within families. Within the context of the larger argument, this chapter proves a culture of family knowledge gathering seen not only in the writers of the recipe manuscripts that survived.

The book’s last chapter focuses not on the household manuscripts but on the printed recipe books, which show similar practices to the family manuscripts, but with a few key differences. The significant difference with the published recipe books is that they largely did not provide where recipes came from other than the name of the author of the collection. But they are similar to the family manuscripts in their use and the way they were created. This is because when acquired by families, the printed recipe books tended to be tested and added to similar to the books created by a family. Furthermore, in their creation, the print books were functionally identical to the family books since they were published versions of important people’s recipe collections. For these reasons, the use of print recipe books presents another example of how families collected and tested knowledge to generate their own knowledge, as shown in the book’s central argument.

This book is written for an audience of historians of medicine and historians of science, and because of this, the narrow and detailed topic of the book fits well for the audience. This audience works well with the content of the book as it presents a detailed account of a specific subject and tries to expand on the knowledge about the knowledge that was created through “household science.” (p.4) The book also expands on the idea of knowledge collection by presenting a lower-level method of collecting knowledge. By doing this, Leong shows how the noble population worked with experiments like those in books like The Poison Trials without being a part of the scientific community of the time. The change of the main actor away from those who viewed themselves as men of science presents another part of the scientific culture of this time. This focus sets the book within the “current conversations in gender and cultural history, the history of the book and archives, and the history of science, medicine, and technology.” (p.4) For this reason, Recipes and Everyday Knowledge is a valuable book for scholars who wish to expand their knowledge of how people other than scientists expanded experimented with medicine and the natural world.

Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England by Elaine Leong is a comprehensive and thoughtful analysis of early modern knowledge transfer in the household. Elaine Leong received her Ph.D. in Modern History from the University of Oxford in 2006 and has completed postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Warwick and the University of Cambridge. Her research is focused on early modern medical and scientific knowledge transfer and production, with a focus on gender, the everyday, and the domestic sphere. She lectures at University College London with courses on health and the body in the early modern era, and sex, gender, and the body in early modern England. In addition, she is a current visiting scholar at the Max Plank Institute for the History of Science in Berlin where she led a research group on the nature of reading and writing in early modern Europe. She has also co-edited two articles on medicine, science, and drug testing from the renaissance through the early modern era with Alisha Rankin, author of The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiments, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science. Published in 2018, Recipes and Everyday Knowledge is her first book and encompasses her research passions by focusing on “knowledge practices in early modern English households,” (https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/users/eleong).

Recipes and Everyday Knowledge explores the early modern household as a space for exploring and investigating the natural world in addition to serving as intellectual hubs that facilitated the exchange of knowledge in social networks via the exchange and experimentation of recipes. The household is defined by the author as a site of “knowledge production and as a collective of knowledge producers,” (9). By doing so, Elaine Leong asserts that the act of collecting, recording, and testing recipes in early modern households set the framework for “empirical and experiential” knowledge making (6-7). In addition, Leong analyzes the role of both men and women in the early modern family unit as contributing to knowledge creation in the household through the collection of recipes. By doing this, Leong examines early modern gender roles by placing women in the sphere of scientific intellectual activity and men as collaborators in household and familial management.

The book is meticulously organized through case studies on a number of English households by examining manuscript and printed recipe collections of the seventeenth century. This format is important because “recipe books… were malleable texts open to correction and extension,” thereby offering the reader a glimpse of “science in the making” akin to “modern laboratory notebooks or ‘research notebooks,’” (13-14). Through the included examples of recipe collection and testing, readers can see the processes of scientific experimentation in relation to the health and everyday knowledge of early modern families. Leong claims that recent research on early modern English recipe collection favors the female perspective by examining women’s manuscript writings and medical practices (10). She argues that her focus on the collaborative nature of household management and affairs extends this research by looking across gender and class relations in households to provide a comprehensive depiction of these “complex social relationships,” (10). In general, the structure of the book is very traditional and scholarly, including introductions and conclusions to each chapter with supporting information sandwiched in between. In this way, the format of the book is geared toward other scholars and historians of the early modern period. However, the language is accessible to a wider audience and the material is incredibly interesting, which is enough motivation for anyone who wants to learn more about recipe collection in early modern England.

Leong’s archival research into recipe collections between 1600 and 1700 turned up nearly 400 examples of manuscript and printed recipe books that formed the backbone of this work. I appreciated her explanation of the way her research was geographically and chronologically limited to seventeenth century England through the documents in the household recipe archive that she explored. In addition, the survival of these collections also depended on who created them, which the author states were mostly wealthy landowners, members of Parliament, and other minor-gentry (14). As Leong notes though, this focus provides a unique and concentrated snapshot of upper-class English families who participated in the making and exchange of scientific knowledge.

Recipes and Everyday Knowledge begins with an overview of recipe collection, social networks, and the place of food and medicine within this culture. Chapter one explores recipe collection through expanding social networks and the collaborative, multi-generational work that these collections demonstrate. Not only did it facilitate the sharing of knowledge within a family, but within a wider circle of friends and acquaintances where new knowledge was disseminated. Chapter two discusses the complex maintenance of the “health” of a household. Here, the author discusses the “science” behind the management, large-scale planning, and organization of a household where hands-on knowledge and trials (such as the testing of medicinal and food related recipes) were crucial to the successful running of an estate.

Chapters three and four focus on the verification of recipes through codification and extensive experimentation and modification of newly acquired knowledge. Before the household accepted a recipe as a part of its “daily practice,” members of the household spent considerable time and effort testing recipes, questioning methods, and trying new techniques. As Leong states, these procedures demonstrate that “householders or recipe compilers,” were “continually engaged in critiquing and rewriting recipes,” rather than being “passive recipients of stagnant knowledge,” (97). Through these chapters, elements of the empirical side of the “scientific revolution” are discussed. The content and argument of these chapters are similar to Leong’s colleague Alisha Rankin in her 2021 book Poison Trials. In Poison Trials, Rankin goes into detail about the types of experiments and testing used to determine if antidotes for certain poisons would be effective in Renaissance science. In Recipes and Everyday Knowledge, Leong discusses the ways in which households would categorize recipes into those of interest, those tested, and those accepted as cures. And in the process of testing, to observe the effects of certain remedies on the human body and adjust production methods until it had been perfected. Both authors discuss the methodology behind testing and experimenting with new scientific knowledge in the form of remedies and medications between the renaissance and early modern periods. This is a significant similarity because it provides a space to discuss the formation of scientific methods in what we refer to as the “scientific revolution.”

Finally, chapters five and six are centered around public knowledge and family history. Chapter five discusses recipe books as a form of recording family history that was then passed down through generations. The author includes a case study where a woman in the 1930s found and opened a chest full of her family’s ancestral documents from the early modern period that contained papers such as land deeds and other legal documents, and which also included a few volumes of recipe books. Leong’s argument here is that recipes collections had value placed on them as historical records of the household that served as “archives” of family history. In chapter six, the legacy of knowledge and what kinds of knowledge were transferred to the public in printed recipes is discussed. In essence, the last two chapters are an exploration of the legacies of recipe collections in transferring new knowledge in the private and public spheres. Overall, Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England is an engaging and thoroughly researched work on the transfer and testing of new knowledge via recipe collection in the early modern era.

Delbourgo, James. Collecting the World : the Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane. London: Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books, 2017.

James Delbourgo is a historian at Rutgers specializing in early modern Atlantic history, the history of science, and  museology.  In his 2017 work, Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane, Delbourgo takes the reader through a meticulously researched journey into the life of a collector from whose work rose the British Museum, Sir Hans Sloane. Delbourgo’s book, ostensibly a biography of Hans Sloane, unveils itself as much a cultural history as chronicle of Hans Sloane with the gentleman scholar serving as a lens through which the reader can contextualize how a gentleman collector transformed a love of natural history into a cultural and scholarly institution. Complete with incredible images of Sloane’s remarkable collection and analysis of 18th century discourse between the state and science, Delbourgo’s Collecting the World for anybody interested in early modern scientific thought.

Covering in incredible detail the processes by which Sloane amassed his foundational collection, Delbourgo’s work develops as Sloane’s collection grows, revealing the imperial, colonial, scientific, interconnected, and personal mechanisms by which Sloane accumulated his collection, his personal wealth, and global renown. The argument of the book is simultaneously revealed as Delbourgo dissects Sloane’s collection; Sloane, though an incredible figure contemporaneously and historically, amassed his collection through a personal approach to natural history and benefitted from the societal changes Britain underwent in the late 17th and 18th centuries. In short, Sloane was the perfect man to amass such a collection during an era of complex societal change. As Delbourgo Says, “Sloane realized his dream of universal knowledge through a brilliant alignment of institutions of state, trade and colonization to serve his personal ambition,” (xxix).

Delbourgo’s approach to this work mirrors the institution he chronicles, weaving a public audience through various intellectual and cultural processes in an easily digestible fashion. Much as a museum-goer would tour through the wonderous halls of the British Museum, so to does the reader glance at the world that Sloane inhabited through a written tour of the 18th century Atlantic World. Delbourgo’s work is separated into two parts: “Empire of Curiosities,” and “Assembling the world.” Part one follows Sloane as he becomes an internationally recognized natural historian. Part two follows Sloane as he amasses a fortune of bullion and curiosities, finally leaving his life’s work to a public in flux.

Part one of Delbourgo’s work has Jamaica at its center. Sloane, the attending physician to the Duke of Albemarle, was in that rare group that benefitted from his employer’s death, as the demise of the aristocrat allowed Sloane to traipse around Jamaica, both performing as a physician and collecting specimens. In these early chapters the reader sees Sloane fascination with materials and the natural world, but the reader also sees that Sloane is very much a man of his era. Sloane’s fascination with cultural materials did not translate into any apathy for the institutions of slavery and colonization. Sloane subscribed to the racial, imperial, and protestant justifications for colonization, often treating the enslaved people he encountered with apathy if not contempt. As Delbourgo says, Sloane “absorbed the instinctive violence toward slaves of his planter hosts,” (51). While in part one Sloane’s desire for universal knowledge culminates in an avid pursuit of natural history and material, in his mind universal knowledge did not need extend to the cultural practices of enslaved peoples, blacks, or native peoples. Part one also introduces us to Sloane the networker, as one of his many gifts seemed to be his ability to maintain correspondences and networks. In an age of scientific interconnectedness, Sloane’s ability to master the collection of people as well as specimens is in great part why he was able to amass a such a grand collection. To Delbourgo’s credit, he does not shy away from portraying Sloane as ignorant in matters such as ethnography. Sloane was a man of empire, science, and mercantilism, often collecting and describing objects and materials based on their commercial benefit, and ignoring the harm that his imperial dispossession may have had on the ecologies or cultures he interacted with.

Part two of the book follows Sloane after his return from Jamaica. In the half-century after his scientific and professional voyage to Jamaica, he never left England again. Instead, the world came to Sloane as he amassed a fortune due to a successful medical practice, land holdings, and money from Jamaican sugar plantations. Because of his reputation as a sober and empirical gentleman, Sloane rose rapidly through the ranks of London’s high society, increasing his collection as he climbed the social ladder. While part one dealt many with Sloane’s natural history efforts in the west indies, part two shows Sloane as a man of the world despite never leaving the comfort of his home at Chelsea manor. Sloane’s wealth allowed him to collect the work of his peers, often spending his wealth of the collections of his diseased colleagues. His renown and wealth also brought many to his door, eager to use Sloan to increase their wealth and social status. Sloane had connections with physicians in far flung EIC colonies, the settlers in the frontiers of North America, and courtiers at various palaces in Europe. All of them contributed, either in material or expertise, to Sloane’s great collection. It is in part two that the reader sees Sloane as something of a paradox, a scientist who rarely does science. A man of letters who perfected the art of collecting rather than fieldwork. Sloane’s true genius, as we see in the second half of Delbourgo’s work, was his ability to accumulate and catalogue material while simultaneously sparking public interest in his science. To the lucky few whom Sloane gave tours to prior to his death, Sloane’s collection was not a testament to the eccentricity of a scholar, but a testament of empire and the possibility of true, universal knowledge.

A strength of Delbourgo’s work is the depth of research into the periphery of Sloane’s life. From the criticisms of titanic figures such as Isaac Newton to polemics such as William King, peripheral figures in the book (though it is hard to call Newton as such in any discussion of turn of the 18th century science) show that despite the empirical tendencies of Sloane, detractors such as Newton and King represent a scientific community and culture writ large as grappling with the nature and meaning of knowledge-making. Newton described natural history as “the handmaid of natural philosophy” and King frequently bemoaned the 18th century notion that scientific learning was becoming diluted by commercialism and early global trade, calling Sloane a “master of scraps.” Delbougo does a marvelous job highlighting the contentiousness, accusations of credulity, rivalry, and connection with empire that took place during 18th century scientific culture in the blossoming British Empire.

Though Delbourgo’s depth and breadth of research is impressive, occasionally he seems to miss the forest for the trees. The connections Sloane enjoyed with far flung collectors is examined in excruciating detail. Delbourgo often goes on tangent’s about English commercial attempts to penetrate Tokugawa Japan or Qing China, but spends little time examining the ecological and cultural impacts of Sloane’s collection. While Delbourgo admittedly does spend a great deal of time discussing the impact of slavery on Sloane’s collection (and this is appreciated greatly), not nearly enough time is spent discussing the impact of collecting on natural environments and indigenous cultures. What does it say about Sloane and the nature of empire and the colonial state, for example, that a physician could collect so many curiosities from cultures and ecologies that were simultaneously being destroyed as Sloane collected their relics? By definition, a collection bears with it the implication of disuse, so when Sloane collected peace pipes from Native Americans or drums from coastal Africans, this act functioned symbolically as a death knell for these cultures. Postcolonial theories such as dispossession of indigenous material and culture is not discussed at length, and the work is almost entirely devoid any connection between mercantilism and science and the destruction of cultures through accumulation of resources. Since Delbourgo is writing a biography, a form of historiography almost certainly geared toward the general public, an in-depth discussion of post-colonial theory can be forgiven. Nevertheless, since the majority of public readership will not come into contact with in-depth postcolonial theory, it is incumbent on the author of a work describing the complex relationship between colonialism, mercantilism, and culture to acknowledge the cultural erasure inherent to this 18th century form of natural history.

Upon Sloane’s death, his collection became a concern of the state as well as science. Issues of finances and who had the right to access the collection plagued the opening of the British Museum, sparking a debate about the nature of the public and the reach of the state almost a half century before the American and French Revolutions. Sloane’s bequeathal of his life’s work to the viewing pleasure of the public and the research of scholars sparked a debate about access to scientific and historical materials that is ongoing to this day. Because of this ongoing issue, Collecting the World is an excellent entry into the history of museology and the history of science.

Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane by James Delbourgo is an honest look at natural history collection in the early modern period by examining Hans Sloane’s collections that led to the foundation of the British Museum. James Delbourgo is an English historian of science and the early modern Atlantic world with a focus on the history of collection and museums. He earned his Master’s in Philosophy from Cambridge in 1997 and his Ph.D. from Columbia in 2003. Since 2008, Delbourgo has been a professor at Rutgers University teaching undergraduate courses on the history of science and the Enlightenment. Collecting the World is Delbourgo’s most recent book, published in 2017, and is based on “15 years of research in Sloane’s surviving London collections in collaboration with the British Museum,” (https://history.rutgers.edu/faculty-directory/307-delbourgo-james). Though based in New York City, Delbourgo is a consultant to the British Museum where he works to present “the historic links between Sloane and his collections to slavery, the African diaspora and the British Empire for the general public,” (https://history.rutgers.edu/faculty-directory/307-delbourgo-james). Collecting the World emphasizes this facet of the early modern world by highlighting the contributions of the enslaved and indigenous populations of the Caribbean who were instrumental in Sloane’s process of collecting natural history specimen which became the bulk of the British Museum’s collections at its founding in 1753.

Collecting the World follows the life and career of Hans Sloane, a man of science whose childhood in Ulster in the ruling Protestant minority of the majority Irish Catholic population influenced his positive view of colonization in the burgeoning British Empire. These experiences shaped how Sloane viewed the world and influenced the process by which he collected natural items to categorize and publish in his work the Natural History of Jamaica as an adult. James Delbourgo argues that Sloane’s career in the pursuit of science and knowledge in the early modern period, (and by extension his wealth, fame, and the origins of the modern museum) were built on the rapid commercial and colonial expansion of the British Empire that profited from the Atlantic slave trade. Delbourgo supplements this argument through his extensive archival research into Sloane’s collections housed at the British Museum which include his published work, manuscripts, correspondence and the surviving specimens and objects and their respective catalogues (xxix).

Though it is written in a manner more familiar to those who have a background in scholarly literature, this book is accessible to anyone who wishes to learn more about the origins of the modern public museum and the world of collecting. It contains copious images of sketches, etchings, and photographs of the surviving items in Sloane’s collection at the British Museum to visually aid the reader. In addition, this book is a clearly written and concise depiction of the life of Hans Sloane and the impact of colonization, trade and the global exchange of ideas that influenced his career. It makes compelling and straightforward arguments about Sloane’s role in the foundation of the modern museum and his role in profiting from the exploitation of enslaved labor and colonial expansion. What this book accomplishes is acknowledging Hans Sloane and his contributions to early modern science but removes him from a pedestal so that the reader understands how these contributions were achieved and the impacts of the global system from which they were forged.

Within the historiography of early modern science and the “scientific revolution,” this book sets itself apart since Hans Sloane, the author argues, has been a long neglected scientific figure due to the complexity and difficulty of his story. Delbourgo claims that in popular history there is an emphasis on the “physical” sciences of figures like Isaac Newton, while “social” forms of science like Sloane’s were overshadowed by more popular contemporary figures like Carolus Linnaeus. In addition, there is a complexity to this history since he was a collector of natural history specimens that profited from the “disturbing world of Atlantic slavery… [which] has proven a far harder story to tell,” (xxiii). And previously there were physical limitations to the study of Hans Sloane. His collections were divided up, some portions destroyed, and others left to rot. In Collecting the World, James Delbourgo attempted, for the first time, to examine Sloane’s complicated life through surviving artifacts and published works.

To map Hans Sloane’s life, Delbourgo divided Collecting the World into two distinct parts. The first part of the book, chapters one through three, look at his colonial origins in Ireland, his education in continental Europe, and his travels to the Caribbean. And the second part, chapters four through seven, focuses on his life in London after his travels, in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, as he established himself as a physician and a collector. Chapter one is a study of Sloane’s early life in Ulster, much of the area we now know as Northern Ireland, and the Protestant/Catholic tensions that he faced as a child in a colonized area of the British Empire. Delbourgo argues that growing up in an area familiar with colonization impacted how Sloane viewed the expansion of the British Empire across the Atlantic and impacted his work as a collector and how he viewed the scientific world. Chapters two and three are arguably the most important chapters of the book. They provide a detailed description of British colonial expansion and the Atlantic slave trade and Sloane’s encounters with the institution during his time in Jamaica. These years greatly influenced how and what he collected, including his exploitation of enslaved labor to collect natural history specimens. These included local flora, fauna, and the tools and musical instruments of the indigenous and enslaved populations of the island. These chapters are supplemented with sketches from his travels, illustrations and maps to detail the intricacies of the early modern Atlantic world.

Chapter four details his professional establishment as a physician in London, his marriage, and the process of the publication of the Natural History of Jamaica, which compiled his collections on paper. Here, Sloane found himself in the middle of Britain’s “growing empire of goods,” which allowed for social mobility in a society of unequal wealth (147). Chapter five details Sloane’s continued interest in collecting, with the author describing him as a “collector of collections.” This chapter is a detailed look at the scientific world of early modern Europe and the exchange of knowledge that occurred internationally. Chapters six and seven are a description of the culmination of Sloane’s efforts of collection. They detail the organization, cataloguing and labelling efforts of his personal museum and the subsequent foundation of the British Museum from stipulations that he drew up in his will. From start to finish this book argues that Hans Sloane’s status in the scientific world, and the origins of the modern museum, were built on the rapid expansion of the British Empire through the Atlantic slave trade and the vast exchange of scientific knowledge across Europe in the early modern period. Overall, Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane is a detailed and well-researched book which thoroughly examines the complexities of the early modern world with very little, if anything, to criticize.

Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane (Collecting the World) by James Delbourgo is a thoughtful and comprehensive biography of the man whose collections became the foundation of the British Museum, Hans Sloane.  Delbourgo’s central argument is that for Sloane, his collection practices were as much about collecting items as they were making connections with other collectors and valuable people, or as Delbourgo puts it, “collecting a world of things meant collecting a world of people.” James Delbourgo is the James Westfall Thompson Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University and received his Ph.D. from Columbia.  He specializes in the Early Modern Atlantic World and the History of Science.  His previous book, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America, published in 2006, details American experimentation with electricity.   Delbourgo tells Sloane’s life story and legacy using Sloane’s correspondence, manuscripts, and published writings, also using Sloane’s surviving collections and catalogs.  Collecting the World highlights the themes of colonization, trade, and state in Sloane’s life, using them to paint a complete and accurate picture of a man the public could easily lionize without this contextualization.  Delbourgo’s detailed and contextualized portrayal of Sloane and his collection is not only an enjoyable read but an educational one that should be required reading for every historian of science and public historian as well as anyone with interests in British and museum History.

Collecting the World explores what collecting meant to Hans Sloane, not just the action of acquiring and cataloging but how he assembled, finessed, and his relationships with the people that would give and sell him the material goods that made up his collection.   Delbourgo expertly weaves the story of Sloane and his collection by building on the themes of colonialism, statehood, slavery, and trade, all of which Sloane exploited to his advantage when building his legacy.  Sloane’s relationships and interactions with people form the core of Collecting the World.  Even when collecting specimens in Jamacia Sloane’s treatment of the enslaved men and women there, Delbourgo gives detailed information pulled from Sloane’s journals, correspondence, and notes regarding his interactions and opinions of the people he interacted with, both enslaved and free.   The author highlights how Sloane’s opinions of people, mainly foreigners, and their customs impact how he recorded them in his collection.  However, it was not only Sloane’s opinions that affected the collection.   After Sloane’s death, parliament, out of fear, distrust, and disgust of the ‘commoner,’ does its best to prevent the lower classes from being admitted to the new British Museum.

Delbourgo splits Collecting the World into two parts.  In the first, he argues that Sloane’s childhood in Ulster taught him to make the kinds of connections he would use later in life to expand his collection early, and the reader sees him use these connections to travel to Jamacia and begin his connections.  In part two, Sloane uses his networking skills to rise in society and expand his collection.  Delbourgo also highlights how Sloane and his collection profited from slavery and British Imperialism throughout Collecting the World.  He discusses Sloane’s use of enslaved people in Jamacia to gather specimens, his marriage to his wife Elizabeth which brought him income from her plantations in Jamacia, and his interactions with the enslaved man Diallo are just some of the examples Delbourgo gives of Sloane profiting from slavery.

In Collecting the World, Delbourgo expertly conveys a nuanced, contextualized life story of Hans Sloane and the relationships he cultivated to form his collection of artifacts, manuscripts, and botanical and biological specimens worldwide.  In part one, Delbourgo details Sloane’s childhood in Ulster and the foundations of his medical practice as a young adult in London before spending the other two-thirds of this section discussing his trip to Jamacia and the beginnings of his collection.  In part two of Collecting the World, Sloane grows his practice, social standing, and collections in London alongside the Glorious Revolution and its ripples.  Chapters two and three of Collecting the World focus on Sloane’s experiences in Jamacia, emphasizing how he benefited from the labor and culture of the enslaved men and women there.  Particularly interesting in  Chapter two, entitled “Island of Curiosities,” are Sloane’s medical case studies in which he not only documents how he treated both free and enslaved peoples and what he treated them for but also includes his opinions of them colored by the scientific racism of the period.  Sloane was not a man prone to drink and found the culture of drinking on Jamacia disdainful; his advice to many of his patients to quit drinking for their health often went ignored, to their detriment and Sloane’s frustration.    Chapter seven, “Creating the Public’s Museum,” begins with Sloane’s death in 1753 at the age of ninety-two.  The chapter details the life of Sloane’s collections and the institution founded to hold them, The British Museum.  Sloane’s will stipulated that “museum or collection be … visited and seen by all persons desirous of seeing and viewing the same … [and] rendered as useful as possible, as well towards satisfying the desire of the curious, as for the improvement, knowledge, and information of all persons.” All persons was a confounding phrase for parliament and the staff of the British Museum, whose disdain, mistrust, and lack of understanding of the lower classes caused them to do as much as they could to keep the public’s access to the Museum to a minimum.

Collecting the World is a powerful biography of Hans Sloane, and Delbourgo’s inclusion of slavery, colonialism, and trade as analytical themes makes Sloane’s life, collection, and the relationships behind them much fuller.   His point that the British Museum and, therefore, Sloane’s collections are a lasting symbol of British Imperialism feels very poignant in relation to the call for the repatriation of artifacts to former colonial countries, a call the British Museum and its government has largely ignored.  Collecting the World is a detailed accounting of Hans Sloane’s life and collections and adds to the field of knowledge in numerous ways.  In addition to Sloane and his collections, Collecting the World gives detailed information on colonial Jamacia and its inhabitance, both enslaved and free, as well as its flora and fauna.  Delbourgo’s book is an enthralling read by both specialist and non-specialist readers, especially those interested in the history of science, Imperial Britain, and museum history.  Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane is a well-written, enthralling read that contextualizes the life and collections of Hans Sloane that anyone interested in the history of science, Imperial Britain, or museums should read.

Robyn Arianrhod is an Australian historian of science.  She was trained in mathematics at Monash University in Melbourne, Victoria, and remains an adjunct researcher there.  Her most notable prior work, Einstein’s Heroes:  Imagining the World through the Language of Mathematics (2005), focused on James Clerk Maxwell’s derivation of the laws of electromagnetism, and the concept of mathematics as the language of modern physics.  The full extent of her powers of conceptual explication in mathematics, as well as her ability to convey the process and sensation of “discovering new math” to a lay audience, are on full display in Thomas Harriot:  A Life in Science.

Arianrhod’s prologue frames her story as an archaeological dig in the British Library, where she undertakes the monumental task of organizing and reverse-engineering Harriot’s papers, attempting to gain insight into his creative process.  In chapters one and two, she relates Harriot’s common birth, his attendance at Oxford via the surprisingly modern practice of need-based tuition, and his initial encounters with and patronage by Sir Walter Raleigh, against the backdrop of the Elizabethan Golden Age, the competition for naval power between the existing superpower Spain and the rising power of Britain, and the British desire to gain a colonial foothold in a New World thereto monopolized by Spain and Portugal.  This motivates her discussion in chapters three and four of the practicalities of ocean navigation in the age of sail, and Harriot’s employment as Raleigh’s expert tutor in navigational techniques.  In these chapters, she describes the development and transmission of millennia of astronomical knowledge underpinning the science of navigation, and their state of synthesis at the end of the 16th century.  This magisterial technique, deployed time and again in the book, establishes the intellectual foundations upon which Harriot stood, and enables the reader to attempt an understanding of the practical problems Harriot needed to solve in the context of the knowledge that was available to him at the time — including logical, repeatable procedures amenable to reliable execution by non-experts.

Chapters five through eight chronicle the ill-fated Roanoke expedition and colony, while establishing Harriot’s status as a bona fide polymath capable of learning and documenting the Algonquin language and culture.  In chapters nine and ten, she relates the defeat of the Spanish Armada, Raleigh’s shifting fortunes, the development of Harriot’s relationship with Northumberland, and, in a particularly compelling section, an illustration of Harriot’s interest in probability theory, likely spurred by Northumberland’s gambling habits.  This vignette is an example of Arianrhod’s technique of motivating a theoretical tangent with a mundane scenario — providing insight into Harriot’s talent for abstraction and generalization.  

In chapter eleven, Harriot and his patron Raleigh endure accusations of atheism, and Harriot survives Raleigh’s self-inflicted fall from grace at court via Northumberland’s gift of a life endowment, moving his residence from Raleigh’s estate in Devon to Northumberland’s, closer to London at Syon.  In chapter twelve, Harriot painstakingly derives the law of refraction via experiment (1602), establishing his precedence over Snell (1621) by almost twenty years, and in chapter thirteen, he wrestles with the problem of projecting three-dimensional curves onto two-dimensional surfaces while measuring their length — of obvious import for the utility of flat maps in a time when globes were expensive and rare.

Chapter fourteen sees Raleigh’s fall from grace nearly complete, as the transition of power to James I in the wake of Elizabeth’s death leaves Raleigh imprisoned in the Tower of London for life.  Chapter fifteen relates Harriot’s development of efficient algebraic notation and his brush with accusations of treason, as he is briefly detained in the wake of Guy Fawkes’ Gunpowder Plot, having done nothing more than attended a dinner party which happened to host one of the conspirators.  After having been released, Harriot’s work on the physics of rainbows is repeatedly distracted and derailed by the continued capricious detention of Northumberland.  This story illustrates the extreme precarity of court status and position during this tumultuous period in English history, and the resulting insecurity it generated for those of lesser status whose fortunes ebbed and flowed with their patron.  

Chapter seventeen is a fascinating interlude detailing Harriot’s correspondence with Kepler, Kepler’s knowledge of Harriot’s domestic troubles, and their mutual frustration with their inability to theorize without fear of retribution.  Of note, the role of the merchant Jan Erikson in shuttling letters between Kepler and Harriot illustrates the criticality of of early modern businessmen, transacting with wealthy patrons, in transmitting knowledge between scholars across Europe — especially prior to the development of reliable national postal services and a fully-fledged so-called “Republic of Letters”.  Chapter 18 continues this dialogue concerning early notions of atomic theory, arising from Harriott and Kepler’s quest to understand why refraction occurs.  While Kepler rejected the notion of atoms because he refused to acknowledge the concept of a pure vacuum, Harriot at points appeared to emphasize the role of empty space between particles of matter, between which light would “slip through”.  While he did not fully grasp the profound truth just out of reach, his conception of empty space as playing a key role predated Ernest Rutherford’s discovery that atoms (and thus matter) are composed mainly of nothing — by nearly three centuries.

Arianrhod’s final chapters detail Harriot’s telescopic observations and theorizations on ballistic curves, roughly contemporaneous with Galileo’s work on similar problems.  Again her strengths are clear — explaining the errors in reasoning committed by Harriot and Galileo, while making it clear that Newton could not have derived the concept of inertia without the half-correct notions hammered out by Galileo.  She closes the book with an account of Raleigh’s ultimate fate on the scaffold and Harriot’s death from cancer at the hands of the pipe-smoking habit he’d acquired among the Algonquin.  Her epilogue reads like a detective story, chronicling Harriot’s fall into obscurity, and in one particularly riveting sequence, historian Johannes Lohne’s chance encounter with a book owned by Harriot and containing Harriot’s marginalia, which spurred further investigation by Lohne and the modern era of Harriot scholarship.

Arianrhod’s dual themes are the case for Harriot’s sheer intellectual prowess, as well as an apologia of sorts for his failures to publish his work with sufficient frequency.  After all, life in the shadow of the Elizabethan court was a stressful affair.  The tragedy of Harriot’s life and obscurity throws the modern imperative for publication into stark relief — publish or perish, yes — but worse yet, publish or be guaranteed oblivion to posterity.  This reader found only one major fault with Arianrhod’s work.  Her endnotes contain exhaustively created and compiled diagrams illustrating the key mathematical concepts, and her mathematical prose would have been far easier to digest had it been interlaced with these diagrams.  In their current position at the end of the book, they have far less impact than they otherwise could have had, and give the reader no respite from a textual onslaught of facts and logic that made her book a challenging slog at times, albeit a rewarding one.

Once in a blue moon, a discovery in historical records may reveal monumental findings which reshape the way scholars think about and interpret events of the past; Robyn Arianrhood is one such contributor to one of these great rediscoveries in lost information. Arianrhood is an Australian researcher and scholar who specializes in general relativity theory and the history of mathematics. She is an adjunct research fellow at the School of Mathematical Sciences at Monash University. Though not a historian by trade, Arianrhood’s scientific and mathematical interests have led her to write books on key figures in the world of science. These include Seduced by Logic about two female mathematicians, Émilie du Châtelet and Mary Somerville, who proved highly influential to scientific developments, especially as related to Isaac Newton, and Einstein’s Heroes about the influence of James Clerk Maxwell, Michael Faraday, and Newton’s scientific discoveries on Albert Einstein. Her latest work, Thomas Harriot: A Life in Science, brings new light to the titular forgotten man of science in the early days of the discipline.

Early in the book, Arianrhood professes the importance of the intellectual fervor of Harriot and argues that telling the story of his life and discoveries help “fill in some of the gaps in our picture of that transitional era” (2) in the development of modern science. His contributions are especially important “because of the quality and versatility of his best work, which, like Newton’s, spanned a range of topics, mathematical, theoretical, and experimental” (3). Many of these discoveries took place contemporaneously to the minds of Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei and prior to the likes of Newton and René Decartes, to all of whom he worked in similar fields of discovery as well as others. His interests knew no bounds, from linguistics to optics and refraction to population growth estimates and others still. Truly a peculiar man of intellectual history, most puzzling is how his discoveries and works were never learned of until fairly recently, the most important question which Arianrhood works to recover and share in this cohesive and accessible biography.

Acknowledging that not much record existed of Harriot’s early life, Arianrhood briefly described Harriot’s character and background, from a “plebian” family in England, Harriot was able to improve his lot in life by receiving a degree from Oxford and moving to London where he managed to attract the attention and patronage from the eclectic Walter Raleigh. The first several chapters discussed their relationship and the work Harriot did for Raleigh, including working on navigational methods in preparation for one of Raleigh’s first of many trips to the Americas and, after their return, learning the Algonquin language as well as developing a universal phonetic alphabet to use to write in the Carolina Algonquin language. Harriot eventually made his way to America himself during the trip where Raleigh had attempted to create the first English colony on Roanoke Island, a trip where Harriot recorded some of the first interactions between the English and Native American Indians. Association with Raleigh led to Harriot’s introduction to Henry Percy, the 9^th Earl of Northumberland, who became Harriot’s long-term patron which gave him the ability to explore any and all intellectual pursuits he desired. At around the same time, Harriot was pulled into the first of many controversies related to Raleigh, this being accusations of atheism, a serious charge in Elizabethan England.

Beginning with chapter twelve, Arianrhood, detailed Harriot’s scientific and mathematical developments under Northumberland’s patronage. Harriot continued to work through issues with navigation, exploring the use of the heavens as well as exploring the issues with cartographic representations of the world and their use in sailing. In addition, he began to branch out into other areas of science beginning with a fascination with optics and the refraction of light. He also developed a system of symbolic algebra, more closely related to modern day expressions of mathematics, in order to express his ideas in the sciences accurately and concisely then the traditional “rhetorical” algebra of his day. In the meanwhile, Harriot’s association with Raleigh led to more dire problems as both – as well as Northumberland – became implicated in the infamous Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Harriot was imprisoned for several weeks but released due to extremely tenuous evidence. Raleigh and Northumberland, more controversial and higher-status men, were still held imprisoned in London Tower. Despite the imprisonment of his friend and patron, Harriot was still looked after by Northumberland, allowing Harriot to continue his work in which he further explored the nature of light through rainbows, and then further still to the heavens once more. His increased interest in astronomy led to his corresponding with Johannes Kepler who acted as one of his intellectual sounding-boards for ideas and discoveries, including mapping the surface of Earth’s moon and the discovery of Jupiter’s contemporaneous to Galileo. Raleigh once again inadvertently caught Harriot up in another controversy before Raleigh’s execution in 1618, a deeply troubling event for Harriot. Harriot continued to work through his issues and interests in sciences making several important breakthroughs despite his failing health. In 1621, Harriot succumbed to cancer that had spread through his body. Arianrhood closes the work with an exploration of the numerous volumes of work that Harriot had developed but never published which subsequently disappeared for centuries, only to be finally rediscovered in the ancestral home of Harriot’s patron, Northumberland.

Despite the lack of coverage in much of the past, Arianrhood is able to reconstruct an extremely thorough view of this intellectual giant largely lost to history. She vehemently and persuasively argued that much of the work that Harriot had done was truly foundational to much of the works of other great men of science if only they had been discovered. She acknowledges that because much of his work was never published, Harriot was little more than a footnote for some and unknown to many of his scientific and mathematical successors. Overall the book provides an entertaining, engaging, and enlightening view of early modern England and the origins of modern science. The material, despite being highly technical and quite niche, is fairly accessible to most readers, a consequence of Arianrhood’s goal to write this as a popular history in order “to join [other scholars’] efforts by bringing Harriot to a general readership” (6). Arianrhood is by no means the first to reveal the work or history of Harriot, a point she acknowledges several times, citing most influentially the work of historian John W. Shirley who wrote about Harriot in 1983 and on whose work Arianrhood relied most heavily. This is the basis for the strongest criticism of Arianrhood’s work; despite its lofty topics and noble goal, the work is not the most scholarly from a historical perspective, relying mostly on synthesis of secondary sources and lacking generally throughout on endnote citations. To clarify, this by no means should deter a reader from grabbing this book off the shelf as it is quite a good work, but it by no means should be the last stop on exploration of the life and work of Harriot. Additionally, paucity of evidence available can be excused somewhat by the nature of the person discussed as well as the difficulty of the topics which need to be explained to any layperson who wishes to read the work.

England was a late starter in the empire-building project. By the late 16C Spain and Portugal had claimed much of South and Central America, and the French and Spanish were expanding their interests in North America. Queen Elizabeth encouraged exploration, elevating a young member of the landed gentry, Walter Ralegh, and awarding him exclusive patents for trade and exploration. With the wealth from his monopolies Sir Walter Ralegh funded three expeditions to North America. Ralegh had met a young Oxford graduate, Thomas Harriot, who was unusually talented in the skills essential for navigation in the 16C: mathematics and astronomy. Ralegh needed a navigational expert, and Herriot needed a patron. In addition to his navigational expertise, Harriot was also a teacher, linguist, and ethnographer. Eventually, Ralegh and Harriot became lifelong friends and associates.

Much is known about Ralegh, but Harriot is almost unknown. He did original research in mathematics, physics, astronomy, and linguistics. He was, arguably, the first European diplomat and linguist to a North American tribe. He left thousands of pages of manuscripts, but very little has been published. The only biography of Harriot was published more than 70 years ago. Recently his papers have been digitized and scholarly interest is increasing with recent monographs on Harriot’s work.

In 2019 the Oxford Press published Thomas Harriot: A Life in Science. The author, Robyn Arianrhod, has written what she describes as a popular treatment of Harriot’s life and work. Much of the book is, indeed, written for a popular audience, but Arianrhod is a mathematician and her treatment of the problems Harriot studied assumes her readers will have a working knowledge of high school algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and combinatorial mathematics. Extensive exhibits and graphs are provided. Arianrhod provides some background on Elizabethan and Jacobean England, so her book would be of interest to students of early modern England and England’s early colonial activities. The main audience, though, will be geographers and historians of science, mathematics, and navigation.

Harriot’s contributions are presented chronologically, so we begin with his work on navigation: refining navigational charts, improving instruments, and teaching Ralegh’s captains and navigators. He taught basic astronomy and how to use instruments and charts. A constant theme of Harriot’s life is his constant drive to improve accuracy and simplify. In the navigational context this means teaching consistent measurement practices, introducing easier to use and more accurate instruments, and ensuring that navigational tables are accurate. Arianrhod describes the navigational problems of the late 16C and shows how Harriot’s efforts over time improved accuracy.

Next, Arianrhod relates the expedition to establish a colony on Roanoke Island and Harriot’s activities in America.  Harriot is the main interpreter. He learns the Algonquin language and teaches the Americans English. He records the culture of the tribe. Upon his return to England he writes up his observations and publishes them. The remainder of the book describes Harriot’s work to improve navigation and his own research into problems of mathematics and physics. As Harriot’s contributions accumulate and he is assured of continuing financial support more of his time is spent on more theoretical work. But he is always involved in helping his patrons with their practical problems, whether they involved navigation or plumbing.

One of the practical problems that Harriot worked on led to a theoretical problem that occupied him for years. The maps made by Mercator were a great boon to early navigators. They represented the earth’s spherical shape on a plane in such a way that it simplified practical navigation. But Mercator didn’t reveal how he made his maps. When Harriot finally understood the problem he was able to make his own maps faster and more accurately and to refine his navigational tables. Eventually Harriot’s improvements allowed a trained navigator to estimate their latitude to within a mile, a significant improvement in accuracy. He also worked on a construction project for his patron that required him to estimate water forces, flow rates and pressures, and specify pipe sizes. He was a general purpose analyst.

Harriot’s technique in solving problems was consistent: he tried to abstract away as many extraneous details as possible, collect data, and then try to develop a simple formulation of a more general problem. To collect data he would sometimes calculate hundreds of numbers in an effort to see patterns that he could use to imagine or infer a general solution.

As Harriot became more established he hired an assistant and spent more time on his own studies. Arianrhod describes these studies within the larger context of Jacobean political and religious intrigue. Under Elizabeth Harriot’s patrons were favored; under James they were persecuted. Harriot’s patronage and research continued throughout James’s reign, but with considerably more drama. Against this more stressful backdrop, Harriot does significant original work in optics (index of refraction, rainbows), spherical geometry, symbolic algebra, combinatorial mathematics, binomial theorem and applications, sums of infinite series, gravitation and motion, and much more. None of it was published in his lifetime and little of it was known to any except a few close friends. Arianrhod describes the nature of each problem that Harriot works on, provides a brief summary of the history of work on the problem, describes Harriot’s attempts to solve the problem, translates his results into contemporary concepts and notation, and describes subsequent developments. It’s an effective way to understand Harriot’s contributions.

Arianrhod devotes roughly equal attention to Harriot’s work and the social and political environment of England from roughly 1580 to 1620. Since little of Harriot’s research was known to his contemporaries it seems probable that he had little, if any, influence on the course of scientific development. His improvements to navigational practice were also unpublished, but copies of his more accurate charts and instruments, together with his trained navigators, probably helped improve navigational practices generally. His work shows that many of the problems he worked on were susceptible to existing or improved conceptual and analytical tools at least a generation before his more famous successors began publishing their results. Arianrhod shows how Harriot worked and gives examples from his notes. For those interested in how the process of scientific and technological discovery works, her examples will be instructive, and the social & historical context may provide useful context. For those interested in the social and cultural history of early modern England the contextual material will allow them to place this intellectual activity in its broader context.

Ulinka Rublack is a professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of the British Academy.  While her primary expertise is in the history of gender roles in early modern Germany, she’s also published a history of the Protestant Reformations.  Her undergraduate studies were at the University of Hamburg, but she was born in Tübingen, whose university was Johannes Kepler’s alma mater.  Thus one might say she was destined to tell the story of the Kepler family and its milieu, culminating in Kepler’s half-decade struggle to save his mother Katharina from being burned as a witch.  “The Astronomer & the Witch” mines the Leonberg and other local archives, as well as Kepler’s own papers, to render an immersive portrait of Kepler’s world, and the precarity of middle-class academic existence amid the religious and political upheavals that culminated in the Thirty Years’ War.

Rublack begins the book with a timeline of Kepler’s life, laying out his major life events, publications, and geographic moves.  This is an effective and necessary technique against the subsequent structure of her narrative, which groups events and biographical details thematically, often entailing flashbacks and large time jumps, making it easy for the reader to become chronologically confused.  This reader referred back to the timeline regularly.  After setting the scene with a description of the witch craze in Germany, Kepler’s philosophy, and intellectual ferment among the ruling classes in the Holy Roman Empire, she describes the Kepler family’s history, with a focus on Katharina’s journey and the practical challenges of survival, and launching productive children, as a middle-class widowed single mother. 

In the second chapter, Rublack shifts to the nearly opposite end of the social hierarchy, with a portrait of the Duchess Sibylle of Württemburg, also a widow, who moved her court from Stuttgart to Leonberg (Katharina’s home) after Frederick’s death.  It paints a picture of courtly intellectual life in the German principalities, and makes it clear that a phenomenon similar to Renaissance Italian city-state competition was playing out north of the Alps.  The aim of Rublack’s digression into herbalism as the domain of women unable to attend university here was unclear, except perhaps to propose that the alchemical activities of highborn women demonstrate an inescapable class element in witchcraft accusations.

Chapter three depicts three compounding sources of growing political and social instability at regional and local levels.  First, the diplomatic efforts of Lutheran princes to secure alliances with Protestant England, pinned as they were between the Catholic Austrian and Spanish Hapsburgs.  Second, worsening food insecurity amid failed harvests and Little Ice Age winters; and third, a ducal governor in Leonberg newly emboldened by the death of Duchess Sibylle.  Rublack provides the impression that Governor Einhorn saw witchhunts as a pressure relieve valve for a population under increasing stress.  The chapter culminates in accusations against Katharina Kepler. 

Chapter four relates the development of Johannes Kepler’s skills as a logician, rhetorician, marketer, and early “crowd-sourcer” of experimental data.  It makes a powerful case that, were these traits uncoupled from his brilliance as a mathematician, Kepler might not have been able to survive as a professional mathematician and astronomer in Holy Roman Imperial society, particularly in a confessional environment where disagreements among Protestant factions over esoteric doctrines like transubstantiation could render one ineligible for a university teaching position (as it did for Kepler).  It sets the stage for chapter five, which describes the Kepler family’s reaction to the accusations against Katharina, and Johannes’ rapid appraisal of the situation.  As Rublack puts it, “a towering intellectual, he [Kepler] had identified how the German persecution of witches worked”. 

Chapter six posits astrology as an early form of psychoanalysis, utilizing horoscopes he compiled on himself and his mother to document Kepler’s exhaustive introspection and insecurities throughout his career.  These tendencies culminated in efforts to protect his academic reputation from his mother’s case — even as he labored to defend her in correspondence with the authorities —  via quasi-disavowal of her in one section of his “Harmonies of the Worlds”, wherein he lays out his third law of planetary motion.  This chapter is utterly fascinating, insofar as it provides some insight into Kepler’s creative process.  He attempts a synthesis of astrology and free will, much as his elliptical orbits are a synthesis of dynamism and Ptolemaic stability/perfection.

Chapters seven, eight, and nine lay out details of the witchcraft allegations, the credibility of the accusers, the dire situations of similarly accused defendants under the jurisdiction of Leonberg’s governor Einhorn, Katharina’s imprisonment and public interrogation, and the petition of Johannes’ younger brother Christoph for a change of venue from Leonberg, so as to limit collateral damage to Christoph’s pewtering business. 

Chapters ten, eleven, and twelve detail Kepler’s decision to put his life on hold, uproot his family from Linz, and move to Stuttgart full-time in order to mount a more effective defense of his mother.  They also explain Kepler’s ability to transfer techniques honed in scholarly argument – meticulous analysis and refutation of details and inconsistencies in testimony – to his mother’s case.  The chapter closes with Tübingen law professors deciding that, while likely not guilty, Katharina must be shown the instruments of torture, in an effort to once more induce a confession. 

In chapter thirteen, the ordeal ends as Katharina resists coercive methods, but dies (likely of exhaustion) six months after the trial ends.  It follows Kepler to the end of his life as he settles her affairs, navigates the thicket of increasing intolerance among potential patrons in a markedly less pluralistic empire descending into religious war, struggles to self-publish important scientific work, and arguably attempts to process the trauma of his mother’s trial by publishing a bizarre science fiction story he penned in his youth containing uncanny parallels to later events (such was the foreshadowing that Kepler became convinced his own story was the seed of later accusations).

Rublack’s epilogue attempts to shift the focus back onto Katharina and various historiographical perspectives on the witchhunt craze.  While her intent was likely to illuminate a less luminous subject (Kepler’s mother, rather than Kepler himself, in the current fashion of social histories of under-studied demographics), the predominant effect of the book on the reader is to humanize Johannes on a profound level, and make his accomplishments all the more astonishing in the context of his stressors.  Modern scholars, some of them representing the first generation in their family to attend university, vying for grant money under the weight of student loans, while remaining alert to the risk of professional immolation at the hands of Twitter mobs, can identify with Kepler’s constant need to hustle, bow, and scrape for patronage while paying off his education, finely parse religious/ideological sensitivities, tutor children of the nobility with little aptitude or interest in mathematics, and subsidize transformative theoretical work with mundane, boring applied work (in Kepler’s case, horoscopes and land surveys).  Such was his grit that he managed to formulate his third law of motion while sparing his mother a painful and humiliating death.

The Astronomer and the Witch: Johannes Kepler’s Fight for his Mother was written by Ulinka Rublack, a German historian of sixteenth and seventeenth century culture in Europe. Rublack received her PhD in history at the University of Cambridge where she has also taught history since 1996. Her research has earned several prestigious awards and recognitions including a lifetime achievement award, the Reimar-Lüst Prize, from the Humboldt and Thyssen Foundations. The research and scholarship for The Astronomer and the Witch also earned her the Deutsche Historikerpreis, Germany’s highest historical award. Rublack, a scholar of cultural history, focuses much of her work in material and religious culture of Europe during her period of study.

Rublack’s The Astronomer and the Witch highlighted the intersectionality of several aspects of life in the region occupied by modern-day Germany during the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries through the witch trail of famous astronomer Johannes Kepler’s mother, Katharina. The work explored the religious conflict and theology in the post-Reformation German states, the nature of witches and witch trials, the lives of women, particularly widows, and the effects of scientific thought during the period. One major focus of the book, a story woven throughout as a means to discuss the earlier-mentioned themes, was how Johannes’ relationship with his mother, particularly during the trial, “[recasts] our sense of Johannes Kepler himself” (8).

Rublack began the story by setting the scene of the region and period through explaining Katharina’s life. Katherina grew up in sixteenth century Eltingen during tense theological debates following the Reformation. She married a merchant’s son, Heinrich Kepler whom she had four children with before he left them in 1589. Background of Katharina’s life was followed by a description of the life of a woman named Sybille, wife of the Duke Frederick of Württemberg. The anecdote showed the life in a Lutheran court and intermingling of noble interests with science and religion. Rublack, too, highlighted the frenzy of witches and witchcraft, particularly focusing in on the year 1615 in Württemberg, the time and place Katharina was accused, to assert the complexities of witchcraft accusations as they “were not made in the poorest areas and cannot be explained as a simple scapegoating mechanism in villages” (75). These early elements served to set up the background and environment in which Johannes Kepler lived and worked which, as Rublack contended, influenced Kepler’s scholarship, beliefs, and skills.

The main portion of the book was dedicated to the trial of Katharina more directly, utilizing archival documents as well as the writings Kepler, especially to his family members. The trial, firstly, emphasized the complex interconnectedness of life in German communities as accusations required the trust and confidence of peers and betters in order to build cases of condemnation or defense, such as Christoph had tried early after Katharina was accused of witchcraft. Additionally, the importance of reputation and education was displayed plainly through Johannes’ involvement. Kepler’s prestige and education allowed him to contact ducal councillors who indeed helped Kepler and his mother. Kepler was able to become Katharina’s guardian through the trial, a requirement during this time as women needed a man to act on their behalf in courts. During his guardianship of his mother and throughout the trial, Kepler wrote about his thoughts on the cosmos and their relationship to God which served to help him reflect on his own relationship with his mother, complex feelings which humanized Kepler and cast him in a slightly varied light. In fact, throughout the whole account of the trial, Kepler’s character and skill was constantly shifting in minute ways, especially towards the end as he worked even harder in conjunction with family and colleagues to mount a persuasive defense of his mother. Rhetoric might usually prove to be an unusual skill for a figure renowned as a mathematician and astronomer but given the trial and its relation to and influence on Kepler, as well as the time and circumstances of his life, make far more sense.

Rublack presented The Astronomer and the Witch as a microhistory, “designed to complement our sense of this period by taking us into the Lutheran world as the Reformation came of age, celebrated its first centenary in 1617, and moved into the Thirty Years’ War” (306). She compared her work to other traditional microhistories, most famously the story of Menocchio described in The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg; however, The Astronomer and the Witch is in some too grand to be a true microhistory. It certainly contains the main ingredients for a microhistory as the core of the history lies in the account of a specific case which serves to relate the vast intersectionality of themes and topics of the period, ranging between gender relations, theological debates, and natural philosophy/science as a discipline as compared to Kepler’s own approach.

The focus on the trial of Kepler’s mother does, at times, feel as just that, a trial about Kepler’s mother. The book grants much of its time and space to Kepler, his upbringing, and his work and scholarship as they engaged with the events of the period. It also works, as Rublack asserted, to recast Kepler, becoming in some chapters very biographical. These are not detractions from the work; on the contrary, these scholarly choices help to ground the book in something – or rather, someone – that is familiar to far more people than some of the other themes and people in the book. The extremely thorough research and excellent writing style masterfully weaves these many elements together in a way that gives the reader a far greater historical understanding than one might get from a straightforward biography.

The only criticism that one could perhaps derive from the work is its breadth versus depth. A traditional microhistory would likely be more focused on depth of understanding in one or two specific historical elements to derive meaning; The Astronomer and the Witch ties in far more which can, at times, confuse the story and take the reader down several themes at once. This issue could likely be best solved by reorganizing chapters to follow themes more rigidly or perhaps narrowing the scope of the topics discussed slightly. This is, however, a minor issue and one that does not too significantly detract from the overall skill in scholarship demonstrated by Rublack in her depiction of Johannes Kepler, the post-Reformation period, and witch trials.