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

A journey in the history of science across the shifting religious, epistemic, and technical practices on a remarkable sixteenth-century voyage.

Michael Wintroub (Author)

9781107188235, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 July 2017

302 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 1.9 cm, 0.62 kg

'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

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.

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.

Subject Areas: History of engineering & technology [TBX], History of science [PDX], History of religion [HRAX], Historical geography [HBTP], Maritime history [HBTM], Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], European history [HBJD], History [HB], Humanities [H], Biography: historical, political & military [BGH]