The Voyage of Thought: Navigating Knowledge across the Sixteenth-Century World

by Michael Wintroub

Overview

The Voyage of Thought is a micro-historical and cross-disciplinary analysis of the texts and contexts that informed the remarkable journey of the French ship captain, merchant, and poet, Jean Parmentier, from Dieppe to Sumatra in 1529. In tracing the itinerary of this voyage, Michael Wintroub examines an early attempt by the French to challenge Spanish and Portuguese oceanic hegemony and to carve out an empire in the Indies. He investigates the commercial, cultural, and religious lives of provincial humanists, including their relationship to the classical authorities they revered, the literary culture they cultivated, the techniques of oceanic navigation they pioneered, and the distant peoples with whom they came into contact. Ideal for graduate students and scholars, this journey into the history of science describes the manifold and often contradictory genealogies of the modern in the early modern world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781107188235
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	07/13/2017
Pages:	302
Product dimensions:	6.18(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Michael Wintroub is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He authored A Savage Mirror: Power, Identity and Knowledge in Early Modern France (2005) and has published widely in journals such as the American Historical Review, the British Journal for the History of Science, ISIS, the Renaissance Quarterly, Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociale, and the Sixteenth Century Journal. Wintroub has received numerous awards and honours, including grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, and the Sixteenth Century Society, where he is a two-time winner of the Nancy Lyman Roelker Prize.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements; List of figures; Introduction; 1. Information: pilgrimage in a church of poems; 2. Expertise: the heavens inscribed; 3. Translation: translating the body of thought; 4. Scale: the heart of the matter; 5. Confidence: a balance of trust; 6. Replication: disciplining monsters; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

'Part of the originality of The Voyage of Thought: Navigating Knowledge across the Sixteenth-Century World lies in Wintroub’s ability to move with ease between disciplines - historical, philosophical, and literary … Wintroub’s erudite book repays careful reading.' Pamela O. Long, Isis

From the Publisher