Peter Burke: The Polymath: a Cultural History from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag

Excerpt

The title of this remarkable book, The Polymath, is as striking as its subtitle, A Cultural History from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag. The distinguished cultural historian, Peter Burke, renowned for his What is Cultural History? and A Social History of Knowledge, has here set himself an exceedingly daunting and, it may seem, impossible task. The title might lead the reader to expect a “character” or “human type” of the kind common from Theophrastus to La Bruyere and beyond. What, after all, is “the polymath”? Is there some central characteristic that marks off all polymaths from what one might call the humdrum monomath? Or is the term too porous to allow of an all-subsuming definition? This is one of the major themes the book explores. In a phrase borrowed from the great French polymath Bayle, Burke offers us instead of a comprehensive definition (itself an impossibility) a “prosopography”, or a kind of collective biography, of five hundred individuals active in the West between the fifteenth century and the twenty-first century. This approach consists of a mixture of close case studies and cautious generalization. At one point, Burke aptly compares his method to that of the pointilliste painter: if we stand back far enough from the infinite accumulation of tiny dots, we may see the whole picture. Of course, no two persons will draw up the same list of five hundred polymaths, and some included in Burke’s list would not be in this reviewer’s, while others would. Among those who deserve inclusion, surely, are Paul Valéry, Emile Meyerson, Ernst Mach, Léon Brunschvicg, Arthur Eddington, Pierre Duhem, and Arthur Koestler, to name only a few. Nevertheless, every list will contain a substantial common stock. In any event, it is by this original prosopographical method that the author seeks to capture in his nets what the early eighteenth-century Dutch polymath Boerhaave called the “monsters of erudition”. …