Nicole Howard, Loath to Print: The Reluctant Scientific Author 1500–1750 Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022. Pp. 232. ISBN 978-1-4214-4368-3. $55.00 (hardcover).
Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: In the autumn of 1612, when sunspots were in fashion, the English astronomer Thomas Harriot offered a conjectural account of their substance.Interested parties would, and still do, find access restricted: we learn of the anagram whose solution was a Latin hexameter 'brilliantly explaining what the spots appearing in the sun might be' only in Robert Burton's manuscript notebook.For students of early modern science, Harriot is typically presented as the unsung double of Galileo, the former publishing too little, the latter, at least in the eyes of the faithful and the sceptical, too much.Why publish?Why not?Which readers to summon and which to exclude?How to avoid both the chilly indifference of an overcrowded market and furious accusations of ignorance, ineptitude or appropriation?These and other questions animate Nicole Howard's Loath to Print, a brisk study of the strategies that such writers, and their correspondents, translators, illustrators and editors, adopted in the uneven but inevitable transition from a manuscript and oral culture to that of print.Howard addresses five major topics, showing the range of options available to early modern scientific authors: their attitude, often shifting, to the newish medium of print; the prefaces they or their confederates concocted; their efforts to manage the distribution of their works; their interest and investment in various copying machines; and their dependence upon those who ensured that the messiest, most complex of manuscripts would emerge as legible books and pamphlets.Although this is an account of individualsthe entrepreneurial London empiric William Salmon, the print-savvy Christiaan Huygens, the heroic Edmond Halley, among othersit also includes corporate bodies distinguished by their energy and importance.We encounter a gradual shift from vast networks of manuscript letters, frequently excerpted and copied, to official publications financed by learned academies and societies, but the crucial intermediate node is the journal.This arena provided feedback from a well-informed community, summaries, translations, reviews and norms of scholarly decorum.Howard also envisages forceful phantom presencesthe ideal reader conjured up by a preface, or, as William Gilbert put it, undesirable audiences 'oath-bound to others' views, or those absurd eradicators of the arts, learned illiterates, grammar-masters, sophists, windbags, and the perverse populist' (William Gilbert, De Magnete, 1600, fol.ii).A womanly spectre of sorts also haunts this mostly male world: not just the convenient target of the superstitious old wife or female medical practitioner, but rather the 'midwives' who oversaw the difficult 'births' of these texts, proclaimed their legitimacy, occasionally 'clothed' them in a different idiom, promoted their 'adoption' by sympathetic readers and
Author: Eileen Reeves
Institution: Princeton University
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4404154787