Saturday, August 12, 2017

"The Voyage of Thought"

New from Cambridge University Press: The Voyage of Thought: Navigating Knowledge across the Sixteenth-Century World by Michael Wintroub.

About the book, from the publisher:
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.
Michael Wintroub is an Associate Professor in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of A Savage Mirror: Power, Identity and Knowledge in Early Modern France.

--Marshal Zeringue