In his book, Michael Wintroub sets out to trace the historical and epistemic processes at work in the translation and replication of thought in the 1529 expedition of Jean and Raoul Parmentier from Dieppe to Sumatra. He does this in each chapter by first examining a specific term that serves as an etymological basis around which he structures the analysis of the historical, social, and poetic (con)text of Parmentier’s voyage. This approach allows Wintroub to portray the rather complex notions of “Information” (chapter 1), “Expertise” (chapter 2), “Translation” (chapter 3), “Scale” (chapter 4), “Confidence” (chapter 5), and “Replication” (chapter 6) as escales or “step[s] in a journey” (123) of geographic, social, rhetorical, and epistemological discovery. This journey extends far beyond the distant lands of Taprobana (Sumatra) and into the minds, bodies, and souls of the sixteenth-century sailors, explorers, and “new men” who undertook the perilous sea “on leaky ships” (1) on “a quest, for land, goods, and souls” (13).

This book unravels the intricate and somewhat convoluted networks of knowledge based out of Dieppe in the first half of the sixteenth century. Wintroub minutely details the international va-et-vient of Dieppe during this period. This large metropolitan city, at least for standards of the time, was a hub of commerce, piracy, and maritime knowledge. Overseen by Jean Ango, a shrewd businessman and banker whom Wintroub labels “maritime kingpin” (2), Parmentier’s expedition had for its mission both profit and glory. However, as Wintroub retells the story mainly through the lens of Parmentier’s navigator, Pierre Crignon, we see that this expedition was not nearly as successful as hoped and that Crignon must work hard to restore the good reputation of his captain. Thus, as we travel on the seas east into the unknown and back again, we also follow the reception and legacy, as it were, of Parmentier’s voyage by tracing the transmission of knowledge across the sixteenth-century world.

Wintroub manages to strike a balance with this book between an overtly historical approach in which he establishes the social and religious context in the first half of the book and a quasi-literary and textual approach that looks to written records, including ships’ logs and poetry, to discuss authority, bodily grammar, and the hearts and souls of men in the second half of the book. While at times Wintroub gets bogged down in numerous suppositions, he nevertheless conveys a convincing and solid series of arguments from which both specialists and students could benefit. This book tells the story of one of the many voyages of exploration that define this period as the age of discovery. At the same time, it delves into a microcosm of intellectual exchange involving bodies of words, bodies of men, and bodies of waters.

Of course, a project this ambitious requires a wealth of different sources in order to present a cohesive chain of analysis and argumentation. Wintroub employs two primary sources, the works of Crignon and Parmentier, respectively; almost fifty figures; and numerous secondary and critical sources to construct, support, and illustrate his own voyage of thought across both time and space. As a whole, Wintroub is successful and he dialogues well with current scholarship that has focused more exclusively on a literary approach or a historical approach. This mélange of the two allows for a more thorough discussion of all forms of knowledge, such as experience, performative authority, authenticity, and replication.

In his epilogue, Wintroub remarks that “Parmentier’s voyage was a failed experiment … but it also launched manifold iterations that spanned great distances and breached … even greater divides” (263). Wintroub’s own voyage is a successful experiment that demonstrates the ways in which knowledge is created, transmitted, and diffused throughout the “(early) modern world in the making” (263). At times, Wintroub’s prose tends toward the superfluous, but it is still engaging and rewarding and ultimately this book is well worth the read for students and critics of the early modern world.