Karl Wulff. Naturwissenschaften im Kulturvergleich: Europa—Islam—China .Naturwissenschaften im Kulturvergleich: Europa—Islam—China by Karl WulffReview by: By Toby HuffIsis, Vol. 100, No. 1 (March 2009), pp. 147-149Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/599650 .

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dressing the senses. With the appearance ofAlain Corbin’s Le miasme et la jonquille (Flam-marion, 1982), translated as The Foul and theFragrant (Harvard, 1986), historians glimpsedthe potential of the senses to enliven historicalstudies of society. Since then, additional studiesof scents, and senses more generally, have ap-peared, along with the usual puns and wordplaysthat inevitably come with this sort of specialisthistoriography. Mark Smith’s short volumesums up much of this innovative field but alsoencourages historians to take sensory studies astep further.

Organized into five main chapters, one oneach sense, Smith’s study starts with “Seeing.”Studied more than the other senses combined, itis the sense with which most scholars have be-come familiar. Tapping into the work of arthistorians, Smith reminds readers how sight be-came the dominant sense during the Renais-sance. Since then, people have largely ignoredthe “lower senses” and regularly “tether rational‘truth’ to a stable, cool, authenticating eye” (p.19). Vision continues to dominate historical re-search, along with other academic and nonaca-demic fields.

The second and third chapters turn to the firstof the less familiar and neglected senses, hearingand smell. Following Douglas Kahn’s Noise,Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts(MIT, 1999), Smith does not privilege music inhis study of sound and attends to the signifi-cance of both noises and silences. With Chapter3, he reengages with Corbin’s classic and ex-plores much of the work on smell that has beenproduced by historians and anthropologistssince the 1980s. Tracing the reception andmeanings associated with smell from the ancientWest to the modern non-West, he demonstratesthe ways in which smell has been used to delin-eate people by way of race, gender, class, eth-nicity, and nationality. He also reminds readersthat the history of the field did not start and endwith Corbin. We remain “in dire need of [more]detailed studies” (p. 74) that reveal the waysmells shaped social relations, ideas of self, andnational identity.

Just as sound studies almost always considermusic, research into taste almost always ad-dresses the subject of food. Like smell, taste alsogives meaning to ideas of ethnic and nationalidentity. Before supermarkets allowed us to eatoutside of gustatory calendar restraints, mostpeople consumed foods that were specific toparticular places and times of the year. Taste,however, was noticeably recast in the eighteenthcentury and has since been used by variouselites to maintain their cultural authority: there

are those who have it, while the majority areseen simply to lack it. This dual meaning hasalso made taste one of the most difficult sensesto pin down in research into the senses.

The last of the main chapters addresses thesubject of touch. Like the other nonvisualsenses, touch is characterized by a relative pau-city of studies. Associated with disease and sex,it was also denigrated during the Enlightenment.More important, recent work on the subject,such as that by Sander Gilman, has advocated amultisensual approach to touch, directly linkingtactility with sight. It is this point that takes us toone of Smith’s more valuable conclusions.

Don’t be fooled by Smith’s decision to ar-range this volume into chapters on individualsenses. Throughout these pages, Smith practiceswhat he preaches. Sensing the Past: Seeing,Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching inHistory is all about considering the interactionbetween the senses and studying their relation-ship. The book is not just about cataloguing therange of sights, smells, and sounds of the past; itseeks to uncover the meanings these sensationscarried for various populations. From start tofinish, Smith carefully considers the way inwhich the senses can transform how we under-stand that with which we are most familiar;frequent references to his research on race andthe American South regularly demonstrate theway in which he has reassessed aspects of hisown work. This book reflects the current state ofsensory history and will remind readers why thehistory of the senses remains one of the mostexciting avenues of historical research.

JONATHAN REINARZ

Karl Wulff. Naturwissenschaften im Kulturver-gleich: Europa—Islam—China. iii � 408 pp.,figs., tables, app., bibl., indexes. Frankfurt amMain: Verlag Harri Deutsch, 2006. €36 (cloth).

The author of this book is a chemist who at-tended Sinology seminars at two German uni-versities several years ago. This inspired him totake up Joseph Needham’s question—why mod-ern science arose in the West and not in China,despite certain technological advantages thatChina enjoyed.

The title of the book, “The Natural Sciencesin Comparative Perspective: Europe— Islam—China,” may strike some readers as oddly sim-ilar to that of one of my own studies (The Riseof Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and theWest [Cambridge, 1993; 2nd ed., 2003]). Whilemuch of that earlier study is absorbed in thisbook, Karl Wulff’s procedure is entirely Hege-

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lian, focused on the development of certain cru-cial ideas that act as “switchmen,” as MaxWeber wrote long ago, perhaps unknown toWulff.

The book is divided into five parts, one on theGreek legacy and its development; another onChina; a third attempting to find the criticaldifferences between China and the West; afourth, on “reason or revelation,” that looksbriefly at Islam and science but also at Europeanuniversities; and a fifth on “balancing” andweighing, perhaps a chemist’s play on Need-ham’s notion of “the grand titration.”

Many aspects of the book are baffling, with sideexcursions into a number of extraneous issues. Theauthor finds the seminal grounding of modern sci-ence in the unique developments of Greek thought,its “creation myths” (Weltenstehungsmythos) and“myths of world explanation” (Welterklarungsmo-dellen), and the generally argumentative tenor of thepre-Socratics and their successors, especially Platoand Aristotle. In the period five hundred years beforeChristianity, then, Wulff locates all the apparent ele-ments of scientific thought in Greek philosophy—itsmethods of rational criticism, logical analysis,“thought experiments,” and more, capped by Eu-clid’s geometry. For him, the fundamental “germ” ofall modern science is based on geometry. He alsothinks that geometry is a universal template thatcould be “rationally” projected onto the cosmos,yielding a new science. Wulff locates all these devel-opments in a social and cultural environment charac-terized by democratic ideas, individual responsibility,competitive communities, and legality. He attributesto the Greek language a special facility for develop-ing abstract ideas and concepts. In general, he iden-tifies with the progressive strand of Greek thought,much appreciated by certain later German philoso-phers.

The section of the book devoted to Chinesethought—said to be in a “parallel universe”—sketchily presents ancient Chinese thought, im-perial state theory, the famous Book of Changes,Confucius, Mencius, the Mohists, Daoists, Neo-confucionists, and Buddhists, along with manyother topics. There is also an unhelpful discus-sion of the Sapir-Whorf theory of language im-peding thought.

Wulff is especially interested in Chinesemathematics and astronomy, yet his discussionis narrowly focused on the arrival of Euclid’sElements in China with Matteo Ricci. A trans-lation of the first six books was published inBeijing in 1608. Wulff’s handling of the basichistorical materials is unreliable. Translating acomplex mathematical subject such as geome-try, with all its diverse applications, into anotherlanguage and placing it in a radically different

culture is no simple matter. Wulff wants to as-sert that the Chinese did not fully understandEuclid in all his complexity, apart from the factthat not all of his great work was translated intoChinese. His evidence for this is mainly an ex-cessively brief (one paragraph) overview of thesolar eclipse challenge of 1629, which pitted theChinese system against the European systemthat was still based on Tycho Brahe’s geohelio-centric model. The predictions based on the Chi-nese system were less accurate (by about 20minutes) than those based on the European sys-tem. But this had nothing to with the under-standing of Euclid: the Chinese system wassimply pre-Euclidean and based on differentmathematical assumptions, albeit inadequateones. Xu Guangqi, the head Chinese astronomer(and a convert to Christianity), understood Eu-clid very well (he had carried out the transla-tion), and he also knew that the Chinese system(called Datong) was fatally flawed. He hadstaged an earlier test in 1610, when the Chinesesystem first failed in such a comparison. Hehoped that this demonstration would prove tothe emperor the need to reform the Chinesesystem, known at the time to be inaccurate.

However, the event so embarrassed the Chi-nese astronomers that they revolted against theemperor who failed to grant Xu and the Jesuitspermission to reform the system. The 1629 testwas the final straw that enabled the new emperorto give Xu and the missionaries the responsibil-ity to undertake a massive reform of Chineseastronomy, based solidly on the translation ofapproximately seven thousand European workson science, philosophy, mathematics, technol-ogy, and so on. This project was carried out andthe astronomical reform put in place in 1632(not 1643). Furthermore, the Jesuits alsobrought the telescope, the first reports of Gali-leo’s discoveries with it (translated into Chinesein 1615), large sections of Kepler’s astronomi-cal optics, and so on, all of which gave theChinese a huge platform for up-to-date work inscience and astronomy, though still located in amodified Ptolemaic system (as was the case formost Europeans as well). Over half a century,dozens if not hundreds of high-caliber Chinesestudents were trained in the “new” or “Western”astronomy at the Chinese Bureau of Astronomyunder the successive leadership of Xu Guangqi(1629–1633), Adam Schall von Bell (who diedin 1666), and Ferdinand Verbiest (d. 1688).Wulff’s claim that “China had before its finalopening in the nineteenth century no accurateexact sciences nor any taken over from theWest” (p. 341) ignores the historical facts of thismonumental transfer. For some scholars, the

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task would be to investigate exactly why the“new” science did not become institutionalizedin China, as it was in European universities.Omission of these issues may be related to thefact that Wulff’s book shows no awareness ofthe seminal studies of Benjamin Elman on Chi-nese education, the cultural roots of its exami-nation system, and the question of why the Chi-nese resisted the Jesuits’ transcultural efforts.

The treatment of Arabic science is more ab-breviated. When it comes to the scientific revo-lution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centu-ries, more difficulties ensue. Wulff claims thatCopernicus was “no revolutionary” but, rather, arestorer of an ancient world picture. It is fine tosay that “force,” “impulse” (or impetus), and“mass” are indispensable concepts for modernscience, but the analysis of what or how Coper-nicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton contributedto those ideas is oblique. In the final section theauthor aborts his historical discussion and wan-ders off to the eighteenth-century French En-lightenment. The absence of geometry in an-cient China and its presence in Greece andWestern Europe explains neither the failure ofthe former nor the success of the latter in arriv-ing at modern science. Wulff is right to stressthe institutionalization of science in the medi-eval universities and the progress made there inthe science of mechanics. But he gets too side-tracked to bring his analysis together coherently.

TOBY HUFF

f Antiquity

S. Cuomo. Technology and Culture in Greekand Roman Antiquity. (Key Themes in AncientHistory.) v � 224 pp., figs., bibl., index. Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.€15.99 (paper).

A couple of decades ago, in his Greek andRoman Technology (Cornell, 1984), K. D.White noted that, as historians of technology,we should be “treating technology as an essen-tial part of the ancient economy” (p. 6). Whitegenerally succeeded in doing this in his exami-nation of ancient technologies that concernedtransport, the processing of grain, the productionof metals, and so on—in other words, technol-ogies for supporting sophisticated societies.

But Serafina Cuomo, Reader in the History ofScience and Technology at Imperial College,London, takes a different tack in her new book,Technology and Culture in Greek and RomanAntiquity. Cuomo brings the issue of ancienttechnology in a societal context down to a more

intimate scale than have many earlier works inthe field. Rather than being a broad survey, thisbook presents a series of case studies, allowingthe reader to see in a more detailed and personalsetting the relation of technical knowledge in theancient world to the realms of politics, society,and daily life. Cuomo uses an intriguing varietyof sources, from technical treatises such as He-ro’s Construction of Artillery to the poems inHorace’s Odes. This textual material is thought-fully integrated with archaeological evidence.That evidence is not always what a reader mightexpect—that is, ancient structures or mechanicaldevices—but, rather, more “artistic” pieces: fu-nerary plaques, sarcophagi, and mosaics.

In chronological terms, Technology and Cul-ture in Greek and Roman Antiquity moves fromclassical Athens to the late Roman period. Thechapters are actually essays—of varyinglength—that examine the issues and evidencethat Cuomo sees as most fruitful in revealing therole of technology in Greek and Roman cultures.The first chapter examines the problematic def-inition of the Greek term “techne,” and, to theauthor’s credit, it allows that there is not a “uni-fied result” (p. 35). However, Cuomo shows thatthe very complexity of the early textual discus-sions of techne—and, importantly, how the ideaappears in both myth and more pragmatic ac-counts—reveals that “techne and technicianswere symbols of change and mobility . . . nec-essary for the survival of human civilization” (p.40).

The second chapter uses a discussion ofGreek military technology to show how techni-cal ability in warfare became an integral part ofbeing a true warrior and a good strategos. Thethird chapter is, in my view, one of the mostinteresting and innovative, as it examines an-cient technology on a truly personal scale. Inthis essay, entitled “Death and the Craftsman,”Cuomo investigates what an earlier historian oftechnology (Steven Shapin) termed “invisibletechnicians.” Using funerary art, she puts to-gether a picture of the role in Roman society ofearly builders, carpenters, blacksmiths, andother figures. The essay ends with the conclu-sion that these specialists were proud of theirrole in society and that they sought to establishtheir place in a culture where an individual wasusually assessed by “birth, connections, or aliterary education” (p. 102). The fourth chapteruses textual evidence and some inscriptions con-cerning boundary disputes in the Roman periodto show how technical decisions were often in-fluenced by nontechnical considerations. At theend of the essay, Cuomo ties her conclusionneatly into her arguments from the other essays:

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