Volcanoes in Eighteenth-Century Europe: An Essay in Environmental Humanities by David McCallam

Abstract

 Reviews opaque abbreviations and let readers of this work pretend they always knew their foliis deauratis from their tr.dor. (tranche dorée, or ‘gilt edges’; the only difference is the language). Providing more than a straightforward history of collecting, however, McKitterick uses the development of different value systems for rare books to examine how these collecting practices have shaped ideas of cultural memory and national patrimony . In his opening chapter he characterizes digitization programs as challenges to the mission of rare book libraries, noting that librarians ‘are both guardians of memory and agents for change. If we do not recognize the nature and implications of technological advance, but simply accept its more obvious benefits, we are retreating ’ (p. ). While digitization is certainly a ‘process of selection’ akin to the type of curation that formed the original physical collection (and which continues to form and reform it), it would be short-sighted indeed to see digitization as a replacement for books of the fieenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. e two formats serve different research purposes. e same arguments that resistant librarians used against the destruction of books by the French revolutionary government may also be applied to an argument against digitization of a single item as sufficient: ‘Bibliographical memory consist[s] of more than single copies’ (p. ). But this is an argument against the one-copy model of EEBO and ECCO, not necessarily against digitization in toto. McKitterick does not attempt to answer the questions he raises about the allocation of resources for digitization and its relationship to modern book management. Rather, he poses questions about how cultural values shape memory, and how the resource allocation, based on those changing values over time, can preserve or destroy cultural artefacts for future generations. N E   H/P   B S  A M J. B Volcanoes in Eighteenth-Century Europe: An Essay in Environmental Humanities. By D MC. (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, :) Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. . xii+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. Volcanoes have erupted into human history and culture for millennia. e legend of Empedocles and Etna fascinated poets from Virgil to Hölderlin and Matthew Arnold. Vesuvius inspired painters and writers from the Marquis de Sade down to Susan Sontag. Europe was mesmerized by Alexander von Humboldt’s accounts of his ascent in  of Mount Chimborazo. e eruption of Tambora in , which caused ‘the year without summer’ in Europe, inspired the participants of Byron’s renowned house party at Villa Diodati. David McCallam limits his study to the eighteenth century, which was permeated by an obsession with volcanoes when many ‘educated Europeans witnessed firsthand a volcano in one eruptive phase or other’ (p. ). is restriction allows him to delve in exhaustive detail into every aspect of that period’s volcanology: cultural, MLR, .,   scientific, aesthetic, philosophical, political, and ecological. (e bibliography of works written before  alone cites over two hundred items.) e book’s thematic organization allows such central works as Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière and Sir William Hamilton’s various publications to be discussed not once but, rather, cited frequently in response to the issue being treated. e first chapter traces the popularization of volcanoes from the discovery of Herculaneum and Pompeii and the renewed interest in Etna to picnics on Vesuvius by such figures as J. J. Winckelmann and the Marquis de Sade and the inclusion of Vesuvius as an indispensable stop on the increasingly widespread Grand Tour of Europe. e second chapter then takes up the ‘empirical turn’ (p. ) by Buffon and Hamilton, regarded by admiring contemporaries as modern ‘Plinies’. It goes on to consider the growing controversy between Neptunism, which advocated the force of the primitive universal ocean in shaping the globe and was represented most influentially by the renowned mineralogist Abraham Gottlob Werner, and Plutonism (or Vulcanism), as propounded by James Hutton in his eory of the Earth, who argued that mountains and volcanoes were formed by molten matter bursting from the earth’s core. (is controversy was so widespread that it provided the theme for Act  of Goethe’s Faust II—a revealing detail not mentioned by...