Yenter, Timothy

English

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in June 1820. Slow epistolary exchange (consequential throughout these volumes) meant that the arteriesof the correspondence survived somewhat longer than Banks’s mortal frame. The last letters to thelong-dead Banks in this selection came from John Reeves in Canton. We can follow Banks’s physicaldecline alongside his decline in inﬂuence. Among the best represented correspondents are John WilsonCroker and John Barrow, the admiralty ofﬁcials whose inﬂuence and activities began to substitute forBanks’s own. We see also Banks’s support of an ill Matthew Flinders in completing his account of theInvestigator voyage. Right to the end, we can follow the trade in plants and seeds from India, China, andthe Paciﬁc to which Banks was central.Neil Chambers’s editorial practice, as in the earlier volumes, is impeccable: orthography and amend-ments are faithfully represented. Extensive notes ﬁll out details of personnel and unfolding events. Thecalendar of the correspondence, with biographical sketches of correspondents, timelines, and a thorough,accurate index, all add considerable value. Production and publication of this series of Banks’s selectedcorrespondence, and the earlier scientiﬁc correspondence, have been supported by numerous grants anddonations, large and small. We should be grateful to these supporters and to Chambers’s considerableefforts in recruiting them for giving us much readier access to key correspondence of an endlesslyfascinating ﬁgure.David Philip MillerJamie C. Kassler. Seeking Truth: Roger North’s Notes on Newton and Correspondencewith Samuel Clarke, c. 1704–1713. xii  374 pp., illus., bibl., index. Farnham: Ashgate,2014. £80 (cloth).The new book on Roger North by Jamie Kassler provides valuable insight into the reception ofNewtonian natural philosophy in the early eighteenth century. North, an English country lawyer withinterests in music, architecture, and more, has received considerable attention over the last threedecades. Seeking Truth publishes for the ﬁrst time North’s notes on Isaac Newton’s natural philosophyand North’s correspondence with Samuel Clarke, an early proselytizer of Newtonian natural philosophyand an inﬂuential theologian and philosopher who thrived in public debate. It also includes Kassler’ssubstantial introductions to and glosses on these writings.Writing about North and Clarke requires traversing through law, musicology, mathematics, physics,metaphysics, and theology with the ability to provide illuminating historical context and note theintricacies of difﬁcult arguments extracted from manuscripts, some of which exist only in fragments,some of which are undated and must be pieced together from scant clues. It is a formidable challenge.Kassler succeeds at making a case for ordering and dating the manuscripts in a plausible way, atpresenting them with useful footnotes, and at providing necessary context. (It was not possible for thisreview to compare the published text to the manuscripts.)North’s notes on Newton reproduced in Chapter 2 and his correspondence with Clarke in Chapter 3will be useful to those working on Newton and Clarke as well as North. Notably, North denies thatmathematical demonstrations can be given in natural philosophy, and he relies on special revelation andappeals to mystery more frequently than his more famous philosophical contemporaries. Importantly, wenow know that North accused Newtonian gravity of being a “perpetuall [sic] miracle” (p. 151) as earlyas 1706, a full decade before Leibniz developed the same criticism of Clarke in their famed correspon-dence.Kassler’s descriptions of the philosophical positions and arguments in the ﬁrst three chapters are oftenuseful but occasionally disappointing. Some terms are used idiosyncratically, and positions and argu-ments are not stated as accurately as those working on early modern natural philosophy would prefer. Forexample, she says Descartes’s axioms are “assumed to be true” (p. 42); this is not a particularly charitableISIS—Volume 106, Number 4, December 2015 925or accurate statement of Descartes’s model of reasoning. More important, North’s fallibilism (Kassler’sgloss: “we must continually live with the risk of being in error” [p. 45]) is termed “scepticism.” However,in promoting probabilistic reasoning North clearly accepts that we have knowledge of things about whichhe is supposedly skeptical. Kassler tries to blend North’s alleged moderate skepticism with his realismthrough a discussion of faith’s role in reasoning that is not strictly needed (pp. 40–49). Such idiosyn-crasies, once noted, are not always consequential, but they require more of the reader than should beneeded.One signiﬁcant drawback of the book is that Kassler’s discussion of Newton, Newtonianism, andmathematical philosophy is not conversant with the excellent recent work being done by Andrew Janiak,Eric Schliesser, Mary Domski, and many others. The bibliography is too heavily weighted toward workdone in the 1950s–1980s. (A notable exception is Thomas Holden’s The Architecture of Matter [Oxford,2004], which is well used.) The discussion of the manuscripts’ importance is thus not sufﬁcientlyconnected to contemporary debates, even though such connections exist.The glosses on North’s correspondence with Clarke are a strength of the book. Chapter 4, inwhich Kassler situates the relationships between Newton, Clarke, and North, provides enoughcontext to make the controversial aspects of Clarke’s Trinitarian views understandable and North’scritiques clear. Kassler’s claim that Clarke’s Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity is modeled on themethod John Locke proposed in The Reasonableness of Christianity is intriguing (p. 216). Thischapter also handles well the problem of the slipperiness of various accusatory terms (“Arian,”“Socinian,” etc.). Chapter 5 includes three previously unpublished letters (one in draft) from Northto Clarke. North’s mysterianism (he denies that the trinity is conceivable but the doctrine must beaccepted on faith) emerges clearly in these letters, and one can easily imagine Clarke’s frustrationwith North, given Clarke’s commitment to the orderliness, explicability, and rational apprehensionof all the relevant properties of God and the world.As is typical of books published by Ashgate, the cramped layout makes it harder to scan than one wouldlike. In this case, it is difﬁcult to separate at quick glance Kassler’s commentary from North’s writings.Separating North’s writings out with a different format would have aided the book’s use as a reference.Having noted this, it should be added that scholars working on Newton, Clarke, and especially North willﬁnd that Seeking Truth adds to our picture of their respective views and reception.Timothy YenterMaria Pia Donato. Sudden Death: Medicine and Religion in Eighteenth-CenturyRome. ix  229 pp., tables, index. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2014. £63 (cloth).Sudden Death offers a learned and original analysis of Roman medicine in the early 1700s, while at thesame time addressing a number of issues in the history of medicine. The book is an expanded and revisedtranslation of Morti improvvise: Medicina e religione nel Settecento (Rome, 2010). Sudden Death takes thelead from the perceived epidemic of sudden deaths afﬂicting Rome around 1705–1706 and the ensuingsystematic postmortems carried out by pontiﬁcal archiater Giovanni Maria Lancisi at the instigation ofPope Clement XI. Maria Donato places those dramatic events in a broader context and examines themalong three lines of inquiry, involving as many historical genres: the ﬁrst deals with the social backgroundof the perceived epidemic and the related public health issues during the War of the Spanish Succession;the second considers the topic from the standpoint of medical theory and practice, speciﬁcally in relationto postmortems; the third moves to ethical and religious concerns. In addition, Donato provides a vividpicture of early eighteenth-century Rome, my favorite vignette being that of the pope spying on hissubjects from his balcony with a telescope (p. 25).This highly successful tripartite approach provides multiple perspectives on a complex historical situation926 Book Reviews: Early Modern (Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries)

Jamie C. Kassler, Seeking Truth: Roger North’s Notes on Newton and Correspondence with Samuel Clarke, c. 1704–1713

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Jamie C. Kassler, Seeking Truth: Roger North’s Notes on Newton and Correspondence with Samuel Clarke, c. 1704–1713

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