Tony Volpe. Science et thologie dans les dbats savants de la seconde moiti du XVIIe sicle: Lagense dans les Philosophical Transactions et le Journal des savants (16651710) .Science et thologie dans les dbats savants de la seconde moiti du XVIIe sicle: La gense dansles Philosophical Transactions et le Journal des savants (16651710) by Tony VolpeReview by: By RhodaRappaportIsis, Vol. 100, No. 4 (December 2009), pp. 914-915Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/652063 .Accessed: 17/06/2014 17:26

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sendis precocious interest in the stars, his piety,and the intellectual acumen that resulted in hisattending school in Digne and proceeding on touniversity in Aix. At a young age he decided ona career in the Church, studied both theologyand philosophy, and was later ordained as apriest. They trace Gassendis interactions withvarious scholars and savants in France, includ-ing his friend and patron Nicolas-Claude Fabride Peiresc and the intellectual broker MarinMersenne. Ultimately, Gassendi was appointedto the College Royal as a professor of mathe-matics. Each of the Vies describes Gassendisfinal days and his death in the home of HenriLouis Habert de Montmora patron of naturalphilosophers in whose home he lived for the lasttwo years of his life.

The editors of this volume focus on the liter-ary qualities of these documents. They note, forexample, the parallels between La Poteriesmanuscript and Gassendis Life of Peiresc,which, in turn, reflects the form of his Life,Opinions, and Morals of Epicurus. Gassendiemerges in this account not only as a restorer ofEpicurus but also as an Epicurean himselfleading a life of moderation and relishing thejoys of friendship, albeit as a pious follower ofthat sect. Taxils account has parallels with thelife of Jesus. And Sorbiere portrays Gassendi asa sort of Christian Socrates. The fact that thesefirst biographers imposed set literary forms onGassendis life raises questions about the verypossibility of writing biographies free from ourown preconceptions. Hence this book has inter-esting parallels with the recently publishedEarly Biographies of Newton (Pickering &Chatto, 2006), which reveals how Newtons firstbiographers labored (often against the evidence)to portray him as a hero, a genius, and a paragonof Anglican virtue.

Taussig and Turner have done a great servicein making these textsproblematic as theyareavailable. Most of the texts have not beenpublished previously. In addition to various ac-counts of Gassendis life, they include a numberof poems praising his virtues. Most of the textswere written in Latin. The Latin texts appearwith facing-page translations into French. Theeditors provide an extensive bibliography ofscholarship on Gassendis life as well as a veryuseful appendix of thumbnail biographies ofpeople mentioned in the texts they have edited.Inclusion of an index would have added greatlyto the utility of this interesting volume, whichwill play a central role in future scholarship onGassendi.

MARGARET J. OSLER

Tony Volpe. Science et theologie dans les de-bats savants de la seconde moitie du XVIIesiecle: La genese dans les Philosophical Trans-actions et le Journal des savants (16651710).Preface by Louis Chatellier. (Bibliotheque delEcole des Hautes Etudes Sciences Religieuses,133.) 467 pp., illus., tables, app., bibl., index.Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 2008.65 (paper).

The subtitle of this volume, La genese dans lesPhilosophical Transactions et le Journal des sa-vants (16651710), indicates precisely Tony Vol-pes main focus. Both journals adopted policies ofsummarizing and rarely passing judgment onlearned publications, a category that includedbut was not confined to works of science. Volpeindicates (p. 14) his reasons for his choice of dates:1665 marks the start of the first scientific period-icals, and 1710 ends the decade when the FrenchState gradually adopted control of the Journal.This date was also near the terminus of Paul Haz-ards La crise de la conscience europeenne, 16801715 (1935; rpt., Fayard, 1961).

Volpes efforts to supply statistics on scientificcontent are hampered by difficulties in judgingarticles other than those in the mathematical sci-ences. For the Philosophical Transactions (Ch. 2)he is able to provide statistics that do show thestriking increase in scientific content in the earlyyears. Historians of science have long known, infact, that Henry Oldenburgs correspondence withhis Continental friends, some of them antiquarians,supplied material for the early PhilosophicalTransactions. But he also decided that the Frenchjournal was too general and that his publicationwould focus on natural sciences. Volpe has lesssuccess with the French journal (Ch. 1), and, oddlyenough, his pages of statistical tables make noattempt to judge what proportion of it was devotedto the sciences; one is thus left to wonder if thisperiodical should be called a scientific journal.These two statistical chapters occupy about 30percent of Science et theologie dans les debatssavants de la seconde moitie du XVIIe sieclesurely too much space, given their limited valuefor the main arguments of the book.

Science and Theology are clearly in focusin Chapters 48, which present sections on suchtopics as reconciling Chinese chronology withthe Old Testament, debates about marine fossils,and a considerable sampling of theories of theearth. This last topic includes some texts, no-tably by Louis de Beaufort and a certain PereDidier; accounts of these appeared, respectively,in the Philosophical Transactions and the Jour-nal des Savants, but it is not clear that theyroused much debate. These journals did not en-

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gage in debate, but modern historians of sciencemight well broaden their preoccupation withThomas Burnet, John Woodward, and WilliamWhiston (and the debates they aroused) to seewhat one can find in other theorists of the earthwho did get some attention in the seventeenthcentury.

What may well astonish some readers is thefinal paragraph of Volpes conclusion (p. 422,which is quoted with approval in Louis Chatel-liers preface [p. 8]): in a Catholic, absolutistmonarchy, which had revoked the Edict ofNantes and persecuted Jansenists, it was easierto achieve a separation of science from theologythan it was in a post-1688 liberal England(Volpes quotation marks). What he had alreadynoted he repeats here (p. 420): Protestants pre-ferred the Hebrew Old Testament; whereas theJesuit missionaries, using the ancient GreekSeptuagint, could use this longer chronology toreconcile the long history of China with theBible. Volpes irritation seems to stem from thetendency of Anglophone historians of science toemphasize the British role in the Scientific Rev-olution and hence the beginnings of the Enlight-enment; Volpe prefers to see these beginnings inthe Journal des Savants.

The apparent freedom from constraint in theFrance of Louis XIV will not bear closer scru-tiny. Volpe himself does indicate (pp. 6270)that the Journal became une quasi institutiondEtat, under the supervision of abbe Bignon,nephew of the then-chancellor, and the Journalwas thus able to publish accounts of proceedingsat the Academy of Sciences. Elsewhere, in fact,Volpe sums up without criticism the remarks ofJacques Roger that theories of the earth prolif-erated in England in part because that countryoffered une liberte a peu pres inconnue sur lecontinent a ceux qui se melaient dinterpreter laBible de facon trop personelle (p. 369). Thecase of Bignon apart, Volpe might well haveexamined for royal patronage Roger HahnsAnatomy of a Scientific Institution: The ParisAcademy of Sciences, 16661803 (California,1971), which he lists in his bibliography.

RHODA RAPPAPORT

Benjamin Wardhaugh. Music, Experiment,and Mathematics in England, 16531705. vi 209 pp., illus., bibl., index. Burlington, Vt.:Ashgate, 2008. $99.95 (cloth).

The title notwithstanding, this book treats peri-ods before 1653 as well as authors who were notEnglish or whose works were not translated intoEnglish. And the book itself has nothing to do

with music in the conventional sense of theterm. Of the five chapters, the first two surveycertain mathematical approaches to scale the-ory (i.e., tuning and temperament) and to repre-sentations of pitch, linear and circular. The nexttwo chapters survey mechanical approaches inacoustics (the anatomy or function of the ear,the nature of sound) and harmony, a termleft undefined. The fifth chapter describes theattempts of a handful of writers to revitalize themathematical approach and in one case to im-plement that approach in the practice of tuning.The book concludes with a brief pointer to thedirection future studies might take.

Two main points are made in a short intro-duction, one structural and the other method-ological. Regarding the first, even though theoverall structure follows that outlined above,Benjamin Wardhaugh claims that the book isorganized around five questions, which he sum-marizes briefly. But these questions, which areunrelated to one another, do not always form thewhole of a chapter. Regarding the second point,Wardhaugh states (p. 2) without elucidation thathis focus is squarely on the content of certainmathematicians and natural philosophers en-gagement with the theory of music (but he alsoincludes musicians and music theorists); that heexamines that content in more depth than haspreviously been attempted (but others havetreated that content in depth); that the book isprimarily a contribution to the history of math-ematics (but he does not indicate in what way);and, finally, that I have adopted the conventionof historians of mathematics that technical de-tails are always acceptable if they are relevant(but he gives no criteria for what he considersrelevant).

The chapters on the mathematical approach,of which I shall mention only the first two, arethe strongest in the book. For here there is aclear line of argument that differs from someprevious interpretations of ancient, medieval,and early modern data, about which there isconsiderable disagreement. However, this fact isnever signaled, perhaps because Wardhaughdoes not consider such technical detail rele-vant. According to his interpretation, the quan-tification of pitch originated with representa-tions that took pitch as a discrete quantity, inwhich the main interest was not absolute lengthsof sections of string but the ratios they bore toone another. But in 1653 a new kind of quanti-fication was introduced into England with thetranslation of Descartess Compendium musi-cae. Descartes used logarithms to produce arepresentation of pitch as a circular diagram, apractice continued by Nicolaus Mercator and, in

BOOK REVIEWSISIS, 100 : 4 (2009) 915

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