Buchwald, Jed Z.

English

Caltech Authors - Main

development in the history of thinking about res
vivens. Bodies are alive for Glisson because
there is an energetic nature at work in them, and
they are distinguished from dead bodies to the
extent that the order of the energetic nature,
which defines all bodies, appears in their orga-
nization. Glisson seeks to come up with a prin-
ciple of individuation beyond the difference be-
tween the bodily and the immaterial and
ultimately finds it in a “process ontology” that
connects stimulus, differentiation, and reaction
with one another in a corporeally delimitable
unity. Glisson calls the entity “fiber,” the proc-
ess “perception,” and the organically organized
connection of fibers a “living body.”
Chapter 5 treats G. E. Stahl’s notion of or-
ganism. In mapping the transformations of or-
ganic order that begin to intensify from the sev-
enteenth century on, Cheung argues that the
object of these transformations, which is at the
same time the subject or agent of an order-
creating activity, is what would come to be
called the “organic body” and that this order is
first identified by Stahl in 1684 as “organism.”
This notion of “organism” as “structure” or or-
ganization would be repeated shortly after by
Nehemiah Grew, in his Cosmologia Sacra of
1701: “How admirable also is the natural Struc-
ture or Organism of Bodies” (p. 63). This is a
stage in the history of the concept of organism
that Cheung has already adeptly treated in an
influential article, and we are reminded here of
the importance of close attention to subtle shifts
in this term’s meaning over time.
In Chapter 6 we have a treatment of Théo-
phile Bordeu’s account of the local regulation of
sensitive organs and Paul-Joseph Barthez’s the-
ory of the vital principle (Barthez’s account of
“rolling flesh” [chair fondue ou roulante] is par-
ticularly interesting). Cheung argues here that
around the middle of the eighteenth century the
school of Montpellier vitalists was instrumental
in turning science’s attention from perception to
irritability and sensibility. Through this transfor-
mation, he argues, the discourse of the living
splits off from the mind-body intersection of res
cogitans, which is constituted out of perceptual
processes, and develops into “an inner-outer in-
tersection of living beings that encompasses
plants, animals, and humans, that are constituted
through stimulus-differentiation-reaction proc-
esses” (pp. 257–258).
In Chapter 7 we learn about Charles Bonnet’s
living “web machines,” and in Chapter 8, fi-
nally, we have an analysis of Xavier Bichat’s
account of the connection of webs into living
systems and Georges Cuvier’s account of the
types of organization of the different kinds of
living being.
In sum, this study brings out remarkable con-
tinuities across two centuries that are generally
thought to be quite far from one another with
respect to the basic theoretical presuppositions
and guiding questions in the sciences of life. It
may be hoped that Res vivens: Agentenmodelle
organischer Ordnung 1600–1800 will eventu-
ally be translated into English, in order to gain
the wide readership it deserves.
JUSTIN E. H. SMITH
Brian A. Curran; Anthony Grafton; Pamela
O. Long; Benjamin Weiss. Obelisk: A History.
(Burndy Library Publications, N.S., 2.) 383 pp.,
illus., bibl., index. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2009. $27.95 (paper).
This beautifully printed book disproves the old
adage that committees inevitably produce mis-
begotten work. It originated some time ago at
the Burndy Library, then at MIT, when Tony
Grafton was asked by Evelyn Simha and myself
(then directors of the Dibner Institute) to revisit
the intriguing story of the raising of an Egyptian
obelisk at the Vatican in the late sixteenth cen-
tury. The architect whose plan eventually won
out, Domenico Fontana, wrote a famous, and
famously handsome, account of the affair circa
1590. The Burndy’s collections included Fon-
tana’s volume, and Bern Dibner (founder of the
library) had years before published a lovely
short book recounting the events. Grafton’s vast
knowledge of Renaissance humanism and his
decidedly nonacademic writing style were, we
thought, perfectly suited to a re-examination of
the matter, one that would appeal to a wide
audience. Over time he developed a much
broader vision and brought together a team of
scholars to generate this well-written volume.
Two of the team, Brian A. Curran and Benjamin
Weiss, had studied with Grafton at Princeton,
while Pamela O. Long has written extensively
about Renaissance engineering.
Obelisk is rather like the realization of a Pla-
tonic world. It is about an idea—the image of a
pyramidally capped, four-sided column—but it
is also about the image’s concrete instantiations.
Chapters 1 and 2 (due to Long, Curran, and
Weiss) begin the book with an informative ac-
count of the construction and significance of
obelisks in Egypt and Rome. Here we learn how
these immense objects were carved out of bed-
rock and transported and why they were built
centuries after pyramid construction proper had
ceased. In ancient Egypt the obelisk was “a
BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 101 : 1 (2010) 191
monumental intermediary between heaven and
earth” (p. 18), embodying the pharaoh’s sacred
and earthly power and the inveterate boastful-
ness of antique monarchs. Ramesses II, the
longest-reigning pharaoh of all, had no fewer
than twenty-five built. From the time of Augus-
tus, the Romans transported these mysterious
symbols of power and Egyptian solar religion to
Italy, where they were re-erected, most fa-
mously at the Circus Maximus (immortalized in
the twentieth century’s imagination by Charlton
Heston’s chariot race ’round the Circus in Ben
Hur) and (by Caligula) in the area of the mons
Vaticanus. We turn in Chapter 3 to the Middle
Ages, a time when Rome had become “an ar-
chitectural boneyard” (p. 62) and a site of Chris-
tian pilgrimage. The obelisks themselves had
become confusing objects by then, most having
collapsed and their meaning, Roman or Egyp-
tian, having long been lost. By the end of the
fourteenth century they and other Egyptian an-
tiquities and inscriptions had become part of a
broad revival, providing “authoritative models
worthy of imitation and emulation by contem-
porary artists, princes, and popes” (p. 69). Dur-
ing the High Renaissance, Egypt and its mysti-
cal, symbolic hieroglyphs (as it was then
thought) became objects of central interest, the
obelisks especially so. Chapter 4 (like Chapter
3, written by Grafton and Curran) learnedly lays
out these developments, while Chapter 5 (due
primarily to Long) offers a striking account of
the intriguingly complex technical and cultural
events behind the move of the Vatican obelisk to
a more suitable location at the behest of Pope
Sixtus V and under the direction of Fontana.
Chapters 6 and 7, which nicely exhibit
Grafton’s characteristic style and acumen, ex-
amine the meanings of the obelisks, and Egyp-
tian matters more broadly, in the sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries. Here we learn, for
example, that Sixtus’s aim was to “suppress [the
obelisks] and subject them to the superior power
of the Christian God” in an effort to confront “a
worryingly powerful strain of ancient pagan-
ism” (p. 149). The inimitable polymath Athana-
sius Kircher, with his combination of linguistic
acumen (in identifying Coptic as the final form
of ancient Egyptian) and utterly fanciful inter-
pretations of hieroglyphs, marks “the climax of
the Renaissance response to Egypt and its obe-
lisks” (p. 171). Chapters 8 and 9, by Curran,
Grafton, and Weiss, range over the eighteenth
century, whose obelisks were both physically
smaller and less culturally absorbing than those
of the High Renaissance, not least because the
end of the seventeenth century’s religious wars
sapped their potential as icons of papal power
and of Counter-Reformation. “Gone,” note the
authors, “was Sixtus’ martial, even belligerent
symbolism, replaced by more subtle intellectual
programs that were much more difficult of ac-
cess” (p. 186). Rome itself became a tourist
stop, a center for the study of art, a “shopper’s
paradise,” and a convenient market for ancient
artifacts dug up around the city, thereby inau-
gurating the modern commerce in antiquities
that has in recent decades become intensely con-
troversial. Weiss’s Chapters 10 and 11 turn to
the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries,
beginning with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt
and continuing through the transport of the obe-
lisks known as “Cleopatra’s needles” to New
York and London. The final chapter (a joint
effort) concludes with the twentieth century and
the return to Ethiopia of an obelisk purloined by
Mussolini—now repatriated not by ship but on a
huge plane at the cost of €6 million.
This is an innovative and exemplary work. It
cannot be confined to any single category—
certainly not to history of science or history of
technology, for it transcends both. It is the his-
tory of an artifact as idea, object, and obsession.
The production by MIT admirably fits the su-
perb text. Printed on heavyweight matte paper,
the book contains dozens of beautifully repro-
duced images drawn from contemporary works,
many from the collections of the Burndy, which
is now located at the Huntington Library in San
Marino, California. Certainly one of the most
attractive and elegant books of history recently
printed, Obelisk sells for an extraordinarily rea-
sonable price. Digital technology has brought
and will bring immense benefits of access to the
world of scholarship, but some books should
exist in paper and ink. This is one of them.
JED BUCHWALD
Jacalyn Duffin. Medical Miracles: Doctors,
Saints, and Healing in the Modern World.
xviii  285 pp., apps., illus., tables, bibl., index.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
$29.25 (cloth).
What is the relationship between miracles and
science? Within the history of science, the study
of miracles has often been tied to the interest in
“wonders.” Lorraine Daston and Katharine
Park, in their Wonders and the Order of Nature
(Zone, 1998), make it clear that medieval natu-
ral philosophers and theologians often used the
terms for marvels (mirabilia) and miracles (mi-
racula) interchangeably, blurring the distinction
between sacred and secular objects of wonder.
Their study traces the origin of wonder as a
192 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 101 : 1 (2010)


Brian A. Curran; Anthony Grafton; Pamela

O. Long; Benjamin Weiss. Obelisk: A History

development in the history of thinking about res
vivens. Bodies are alive for Glisson because
there is an energetic nature at work in them, and
they are distinguished from dead bodies to the
extent that the order of the energetic nature,
which defines all bodies, appears in their orga-
nization. Glisson seeks to come up with a prin-
ciple of individuation beyond the difference be-
tween the bodily and the immaterial and
ultimately finds it in a “process ontology” that
connects stimulus, differentiation, and reaction
with one another in a corporeally delimitable
unity. Glisson calls the entity “fiber,” the proc-
ess “perception,” and the organically organized
connection of fibers a “living body.”
Chapter 5 treats G. E. Stahl’s notion of or-
ganism. In mapping the transformations of or-
ganic order that begin to intensify from the sev-
enteenth century on, Cheung argues that the
object of these transformations, which is at the
same time the subject or agent of an order-
creating activity, is what would come to be
called the “organic body” and that this order is
first identified by Stahl in 1684 as “organism.”
This notion of “organism” as “structure” or or-
ganization would be repeated shortly after by
Nehemiah Grew, in his Cosmologia Sacra of
1701: “How admirable also is the natural Struc-
ture or Organism of Bodies” (p. 63). This is a
stage in the history of the concept of organism
that Cheung has already adeptly treated in an
influential article, and we are reminded here of
the importance of close attention to subtle shifts
in this term’s meaning over time.
In Chapter 6 we have a treatment of The´o-
phile Bordeu’s account of the local regulation of
sensitive organs and Paul-Joseph Barthez’s the-
ory of the vital principle (Barthez’s account of
“rolling flesh” [chair fondue ou roulante] is par-
ticularly interesting). Cheung argues here that
around the middle of the eighteenth century the
school of Montpellier vitalists was instrumental
in turning science’s attention from perception to
irritability and sensibility. Through this transfor-
mation, he argues, the discourse of the living
splits off from the mind-body intersection of res
cogitans, which is constituted out of perceptual
processes, and develops into “an inner-outer in-
tersection of living beings that encompasses
plants, animals, and humans, that are constituted
through stimulus-differentiation-reaction proc-
esses” (pp. 257–258).
In Chapter 7 we learn about Charles Bonnet’s
living “web machines,” and in Chapter 8, fi-
nally, we have an analysis of Xavier Bichat’s
account of the connection of webs into living
systems and Georges Cuvier’s account of the
types of organization of the different kinds of
living being.
In sum, this study brings out remarkable con-
tinuities across two centuries that are generally
thought to be quite far from one another with
respect to the basic theoretical presuppositions
and guiding questions in the sciences of life. It
may be hoped that Res vivens: Agentenmodelle
organischer Ordnung 1600–1800 will eventu-
ally be translated into English, in order to gain
the wide readership it deserves.
JUSTIN E. H. SMITH
Brian A. Curran; Anthony Grafton; Pamela
O. Long; Benjamin Weiss. Obelisk: A History.
(Burndy Library Publications, N.S., 2.) 383 pp.,
illus., bibl., index. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2009. $27.95 (paper).
This beautifully printed book disproves the old
adage that committees inevitably produce mis-
begotten work. It originated some time ago at
the Burndy Library, then at MIT, when Tony
Grafton was asked by Evelyn Simha and myself
(then directors of the Dibner Institute) to revisit
the intriguing story of the raising of an Egyptian
obelisk at the Vatican in the late sixteenth cen-
tury. The architect whose plan eventually won
out, Domenico Fontana, wrote a famous, and
famously handsome, account of the affair circa
1590. The Burndy’s collections included Fon-
tana’s volume, and Bern Dibner (founder of the
library) had years before published a lovely
short book recounting the events. Grafton’s vast
knowledge of Renaissance humanism and his
decidedly nonacademic writing style were, we
thought, perfectly suited to a re-examination of
the matter, one that would appeal to a wide
audience. Over time he developed a much
broader vision and brought together a team of
scholars to generate this well-written volume.
Two of the team, Brian A. Curran and Benjamin
Weiss, had studied with Grafton at Princeton,
while Pamela O. Long has written extensively
about Renaissance engineering.
Obelisk is rather like the realization of a Pla-
tonic world. It is about an idea—the image of a
pyramidally capped, four-sided column—but it
is also about the image’s concrete instantiations.
Chapters 1 and 2 (due to Long, Curran, and
Weiss) begin the book with an informative ac-
count of the construction and significance of
obelisks in Egypt and Rome. Here we learn how
these immense objects were carved out of bed-
rock and transported and why they were built
centuries after pyramid construction proper had
ceased. In ancient Egypt the obelisk was “a
BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 101 : 1 (2010) 191
monumental intermediary between heaven and
earth” (p. 18), embodying the pharaoh’s sacred
and earthly power and the inveterate boastful-
ness of antique monarchs. Ramesses II, the
longest-reigning pharaoh of all, had no fewer
than twenty-five built. From the time of Augus-
tus, the Romans transported these mysterious
symbols of power and Egyptian solar religion to
Italy, where they were re-erected, most fa-
mously at the Circus Maximus (immortalized in
the twentieth century’s imagination by Charlton
Heston’s chariot race ’round the Circus in Ben
Hur) and (by Caligula) in the area of the mons
Vaticanus. We turn in Chapter 3 to the Middle
Ages, a time when Rome had become “an ar-
chitectural boneyard” (p. 62) and a site of Chris-
tian pilgrimage. The obelisks themselves had
become confusing objects by then, most having
collapsed and their meaning, Roman or Egyp-
tian, having long been lost. By the end of the
fourteenth century they and other Egyptian an-
tiquities and inscriptions had become part of a
broad revival, providing “authoritative models
worthy of imitation and emulation by contem-
porary artists, princes, and popes” (p. 69). Dur-
ing the High Renaissance, Egypt and its mysti-
cal, symbolic hieroglyphs (as it was then
thought) became objects of central interest, the
obelisks especially so. Chapter 4 (like Chapter
3, written by Grafton and Curran) learnedly lays
out these developments, while Chapter 5 (due
primarily to Long) offers a striking account of
the intriguingly complex technical and cultural
events behind the move of the Vatican obelisk to
a more suitable location at the behest of Pope
Sixtus V and under the direction of Fontana.
Chapters 6 and 7, which nicely exhibit
Grafton’s characteristic style and acumen, ex-
amine the meanings of the obelisks, and Egyp-
tian matters more broadly, in the sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries. Here we learn, for
example, that Sixtus’s aim was to “suppress [the
obelisks] and subject them to the superior power
of the Christian God” in an effort to confront “a
worryingly powerful strain of ancient pagan-
ism” (p. 149). The inimitable polymath Athana-
sius Kircher, with his combination of linguistic
acumen (in identifying Coptic as the final form
of ancient Egyptian) and utterly fanciful inter-
pretations of hieroglyphs, marks “the climax of
the Renaissance response to Egypt and its obe-
lisks” (p. 171). Chapters 8 and 9, by Curran,
Grafton, and Weiss, range over the eighteenth
century, whose obelisks were both physically
smaller and less culturally absorbing than those
of the High Renaissance, not least because the
end of the seventeenth century’s religious wars
sapped their potential as icons of papal power
and of Counter-Reformation. “Gone,” note the
authors, “was Sixtus’ martial, even belligerent
symbolism, replaced by more subtle intellectual
programs that were much more difficult of ac-
cess” (p. 186). Rome itself became a tourist
stop, a center for the study of art, a “shopper’s
paradise,” and a convenient market for ancient
artifacts dug up around the city, thereby inau-
gurating the modern commerce in antiquities
that has in recent decades become intensely con-
troversial. Weiss’s Chapters 10 and 11 turn to
the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries,
beginning with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt
and continuing through the transport of the obe-
lisks known as “Cleopatra’s needles” to New
York and London. The final chapter (a joint
effort) concludes with the twentieth century and
the return to Ethiopia of an obelisk purloined by
Mussolini—now repatriated not by ship but on a
huge plane at the cost of €6 million.
This is an innovative and exemplary work. It
cannot be confined to any single category—
certainly not to history of science or history of
technology, for it transcends both. It is the his-
tory of an artifact as idea, object, and obsession.
The production by MIT admirably fits the su-
perb text. Printed on heavyweight matte paper,
the book contains dozens of beautifully repro-
duced images drawn from contemporary works,
many from the collections of the Burndy, which
is now located at the Huntington Library in San
Marino, California. Certainly one of the most
attractive and elegant books of history recently
printed, Obelisk sells for an extraordinarily rea-
sonable price. Digital technology has brought
and will bring immense benefits of access to the
world of scholarship, but some books should
exist in paper and ink. This is one of them.
JED BUCHWALD
Jacalyn Duffin. Medical Miracles: Doctors,
Saints, and Healing in the Modern World.
xviii  285 pp., apps., illus., tables, bibl., index.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
$29.25 (cloth).
What is the relationship between miracles and
science? Within the history of science, the study
of miracles has often been tied to the interest in
“wonders.” Lorraine Daston and Katharine
Park, in their Wonders and the Order of Nature
(Zone, 1998), make it clear that medieval natu-
ral philosophers and theologians often used the
terms for marvels (mirabilia) and miracles (mi-
racula) interchangeably, blurring the distinction
between sacred and secular objects of wonder.
Their study traces the origin of wonder as a
192 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 101 : 1 (2010)


https://authors.library.caltech.edu/18588/1/Buchwald2010p10117Isis.pdf

Brian A. Curran; Anthony Grafton; Pamela O. Long; Benjamin Weiss. Obelisk: A History

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