Histories of Science, Exploration, and Scientific Institutions Around the Pacific Rim

Abstract

and Scientific Institutions Around the Pacific Rim Claudian, to the likes of Sannazaro, Spenser, Drayton, and Milton —Herendeen shows that the development of "history;' of historistic thinking, in Mediterranean and European culture — and, indeed, of the notions of community, citizen, and nation—cannot be separated from the development, refinement, and amplification of notions of topos and archetypal topoi, particularly of the river. He shows in addition, or as a result— and particularly in his discussion of Drayton's Poly-Olbion —that the origins of landscape art and nature appreciation, in which "landscape acquires a value of its own, apart from its historical credentials" (p. 307), are as much to be found in shifting political currents of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, particularly in Britain, as they are in the Dutch landscape painters of the seventeenth century or the formal dualism of Descartes — and, indeed — if only by implication—that perhaps those Dutch landscapes and even Descartes' dualism are responses to changing political circumstances, the breakdown of topoi that had initially made inseparable the citizen, the community, and what we have since come to call the landscape. At its best, then, Herendeen's is a powerful and revealing book. At its worst, it gets one so wound up in tracking the detailed, figural history of "the river"— or so concerned about its author's enthusiasms for and comparative evaluations of "river poems" and "river poets"— that one can easily lose track of its main, and important, argument. What impedes here are not only the philosophical difficulties, but the notion of the "river petem" as a distinct genre (are we then to consider "bird poems" or "snake poems" or "love poems" as genres?), and the toofrequent intrusions of bits and pieces of contemporary hydrology, limnology, and watershed management into the explication of pre-Enlightenment poems and poets — poems that take on "riverine elements" and "riverine characters;' and poets who serve "riparian" apprenticeships. The effort to blend the scientific and the literary, the environmental and the stylistic, would be more appreciable if the topoi hadn't changed so much in the last three hundred years.