A volume like this, which yokes nearly a dozen excellent articles to a doddering and misdirected interpretive frame, makes a reviewer very frustrated. The brevity demanded by print journals prohibits meaningful engagement with the individual papers, yet they are the strength of volumes like this. Adding frustration is the price tag, for who besides libraries will pay $140 to acquire this book?
The book's overall conception further frustrates, since it offers no argument for acquiring the volume in its entirety. “The vast majority of the papers were given at an international conference held at the Edward Worth Library, Dublin,” where coeditor Elizabethanne Boran serves as librarian (1). The 2012 event marked “Dublin's year as City of Science,” helping to show that the city was something other than “a backwater … for the reception and reading of Newton” (2). Thankfully, the collection is not composed of what Clifford Truesdell once called “honey-sauced eulogies” tracing the sweetness and light of Sir Isaac's influence. Its strength resides, instead, in the commitment of each contributor to showing “the various ways Newton's works … were read, interpreted and challenged in early modern Europe during the eighteenth century” (1).
Boran's summary introduction helps by fruitfully reorganizing the chapters so as to better draw out the connections between each. She also improves the compendium by correctly emphasizing the exceedingly recondite nature of Newton's published texts, especially his epochal Principia Mathematica, and his authorial preference for forbiddingly complicated books. Given their abstruse difficulty, almost no one actually read Newton's texts directly, including scientific experts. The many Enlightenment Newtonianisms (always plural) that we associate with his work were not, therefore, produced by reading him directly but, instead, through the translation of his ideas into textbooks, learned commentaries, popular synopses, and “poor man's Principias,” to use Stephen Snoeblen's artful description.
The articles in this volume show in vivid detail how the eighteenth-century historical passage from Newton to the many Enlightenment Newtonianisms occurred. Breaking with the literal title of the book, and the collection's ill-conceived organization, Boran's introduction also frames the articles as case studies illustrating this Europe-wide yet locally contingent process. In part 1, “Introducing Newton,” Claudio Addabo shows how Newtonian textbooks adapted for Italian universities were the vehicle for his introduction into Naples, while in Spain, as Juan Navarro Loidi shows, it was gunnery science and military manuals that did the work. Gerhard Wiesenfeldt traces Newton's presence, albeit often marginal, in the curricula of the distinctively practical Dutch universities, and Sarah Hutton finds him circulating in elite English society through the scientific popularizations of Elizabeth Carter. Ann Marie Roos finds him in the debates among Irish doctors after 1730, even though Newton never wrote anything remotely medical.
These doctors were introduced to Newton as medical students in Leiden through textbooks authored by Willem ’s Gravesande and Pieter van Musschenbroek. But, as Steffene Ducheyne shows in part 2, “Challenging Newton,” their confrontation with Newton was also a “Remodeling of Newton,” the title of part 3, since these authors developed their own versions of Newtonianism and held views that changed over their lifetimes. Catherine Abou-Nemeh similarly shows how the Dutch savant Nicolaas Hartsoeker developed his own comet theory through arguments with Newton's theory waged with the authors of Newtonian texts. Luc Peterschmitt likewise finds Bishop Berkeley engaged with Newtonianism through choices about which Newtonian ideas to embrace and reject, and Marius Stan explores how Continental mathematicians developed what we now call “Newtonian mechanics” through a conscious rejection of key Newtonian concepts. In part 3, William R. Newman explores the “Remodeling of Newton” in eighteenth-century chymistry, but only after acknowledging that none of the people he studies had any direct access to Newton's writings on the topic.
In the end, the articles in Reading Newton reveal how “Introducing Newton,” “Challenging Newton,” and “Remodeling Newton” all happened simultaneously, and at a considerable distance from Newton's actual texts. Newton was absorbed into eighteenth-century thought through a continual debate about which Newtonian idea mattered, which authority on Newton should be trusted, and which Newtonian understanding should be placed at the heart of any emergent Newtonianism. So why avoid this reality and, instead, force these articles into the volume's misguided interpretive rubrics? Responsibility for this outcome most likely falls to the other coeditor, who also misses an opportunity to improve the book in his concluding article, choosing to flame polemics rather than tie the volume together. The glaring absence of Newton's eighteenth-century French reception in the volume is also likely explained by this editor's peculiar intellectual proclivities.
Were each of these articles to be published individually, almost all would be enthusiastically recommended. But as an expensive and poorly conceptualized book that is much less as a whole than the sum of its parts, it cannot be commended. It is to be hoped, however, that libraries will buy it so that the fine scholarship contained herein can at least be accessed through the rusty old academic machinery that generated this volume in the first place.
