Essay reviews: The stones of Venice

Abstract

A Calendar of the Correspondence of John Strange, F. R. S. (1732-1799) . Edited with an introduction by Luca Ciancio. London, The Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1995. Pp. 152, £8.00 (Paperback). ISBN: 085484-063-X This diligently researched volume, the second in the Wellcome Institute’s Occasional Publications series, sheds new light on a multidisciplinary treasure trove. The result of a determined piece of scholarship, which took its compiler on an inverted Grand Tour of libraries from Bologna to the Isle of Bute, the Calendar achieves far more than its stated aim of locating the entire surviving correspondence of a minor, if revealing, figure of Enlightenment scientific culture. The book succeeds in establishing the context of some of the many intellectual and cultural impulses that drove amateur scholars to debate and construct new methodologies in the service of the nascent observational sciences. John Strange worked in a period that was becoming ever more preoccupied with the creation of taxonomies of learning, the later fruits of which we have inherited as academic disciplines, the boundaries between them having become seemingly impermeable. For Strange and his contemporaries, however, the works of nature and of man, although clearly distinguishable, provided the allied contemplations of an educated, modern mind.