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Current APS Memoirs
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Alexander the Great: Coinage, Finances, and Policy Georges Le Rider Memoirs of the Vol. 261 - $50.00 ISBN: 978-0-87169-261-0 |
This English translation of Georges Le Rider’s comprehensive study of the coinage and financial policy of Alexander the Great (Alexandre Le Grand: Monnaie, Finances et Politique) brings, for the first time, the magisterial scholarship of one of the world’s greatest living numismatists before an Anglophone public. For more than forty years Le Rider has published fundamental studies on the coinages of the ancient Middle East and eastern Mediterranean world, particularly from the time of Philip II (Alexander’s father), Alexander himself, and the Seleucid empire. The book of 2003 that is now appearing in English represents the culmination of a lifetime of reflection on the coinage of Alexander.
It is not only Le Rider’s gift for seeing the implications of his multitudinous coinage issues that every reader of his works in French will know so well: it is the uncommon lucidity and simplicity of his presentation of the material. No one could hope to capture the crystalline clarity of his French prose, but, by working closely with Le Rider himself and with numismatic specialists, above all Le Rider’s friend and collaborator Hyla Troxell, William E. Higgins has created a book worthy of the original. It manages to retain the excitement of a detective investigation that begins with an anecdote handed down by Plutarch and ends by subverting it. Special thanks go to the Aristotle Onassis Foundation, which generously funded the translation through the intercession of Michel Amandry.
French historian Georges Le Rider is a professor at the Collège de France, a member of l'Institut de France and a specialist in numismatics. He has taught at both the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and the Collège de France, and has also served as Director of the French Institute of Anatolian Studies in Istanbul. From 1975-1981 he had the major position of Administrateur général of the Bibliothèque Nationale of France. Since 1989 he has been a Member of the Institut de France in the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres. In 1996 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
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The Passion of George Sarton: A Modern Marriage and Its Discipline Lewis Pyenson Memoirs of the Vol. 260 - $90.00 ISBN: 978-0-87169-260-3 |
George Sarton animated the discipline of history of science in America. This monograph, the first full-length study of Sarton’s life and work, traces his youth and education in Ghent, Belgium, and his stormy marriage to the talented English artist Mabel Elwes. It follows George and Mabel Sarton in their path from idealistic refugees fleeing the invasion of Belgium in 1914 to destitute intellectuals at Harvard University. For half a century, history of science as an academic specialty owed much to George Sarton’s visions and anxieties, especially as they were expressed in his marriage. Mabel Sarton sustained his enterprise and contributed to its form, which included parts of socialism, pacifism, aesthetics, and faith. Current themes present in George Sarton’s early work include the common endeavor of artists and scientists, the private nature of scientific innovation, and the history of science as a bridge between the cultures of the humanities and the natural sciences.
Lewis Pyenson is Dean of the Graduate College at Western Michigan University. Formerly he was Research Professor of History at the Center for Louisiana Studies and Adjunct Professor of Cognitive Science, Philosophy, Physics, and Modern Languages at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Corresponding Member of the International Academy of the History of Science. In 2005 he lectured in the George Sarton Chair at the University of Ghent in Belgium.
This is a spectacular and completely original book. Lewis Pyenson has recreated both biographies and the narratives of George and Mabel Sarton’s relationship by marshaling a stunning range of sources, most importantly the incredibly detailed epistolary relationship of the two principals. At the same time, the book explores George’s intellectual world both in Belgium and the United States and thereby draws out the interesting web of ideas and personalities that formed the core of the nascent discipline of the History of Science, whose foundational institutional organization was largely George’s work.
Thomas Glick, Professor of History
Boston University
Lewis Pyenson is a historian of science of extraordinary breadth no less than remarkable depth and a writer of real distinction. He succeeds in bringing George and Mabel Sarton to life and giving the readers an intimate look into the inwardness of their marriage.
Charles Gillispie, Dayton-Stockton Professor of History of Science Emeritus
Princeton University
This is an important book for the scholarly communities of letters, criticism, and history and philosophy of science. The conceptual, language, and work skills and habits possessed by Lewis Pyenson are rarely found today in the history of science tribe.
C. Stewart Gillmor, Professor of History & Science, Emeritus
Wesleyan University
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Renaissance Vision from Spectacles to Telescopes Vincent Ilardi Memoirs of the Vol. 259 - $85.00 ISBN-10: 0-87169-259-7 |
Renaissance Vision from Spectacles to Telescopes deals with the history of eyeglasses from their invention in Italy ca. 1286 to the appearance of the telescope three centuries later. "By the end of the sixteenth century eyeglasses were as common in western and central Europe as desktop computers are in western developed countries today." Eyeglasses served an important technological function at both the intellectual and practical level, not only easing the textual studies of scholars but also easing the work of craftsmen/small businessmen.
An important subthesis of this book is that Florence, rather than Venice, seems to have dominated the commercial market for eyeglasses during the fifteenth century, when two crucial developments occurred: the ability to grind convex lenses for various levels of presbyopia and the ability to grind concave lenses for the correction of myopia. As a result, eyeglasses could be made almost to prescription by the early seventeenth century.
Vincent Ilardi is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and through the years has been a prolific speaker and author on the fifteenth century. Papers presented include "Diplomatic History as 'Total' History? A Fifteenth-Century Perspective" (International Congress on the Fifteenth Century, University of Perpignan, France, 1990); books include Studies in Italian Renaissance Diplomatic History (London, Variorum Reprints, 1986).
WINNER OF THE 2006 J. F. LEWIS AWARD
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The Temple of Night at Schönau: Architecture, Music, and Theater in a Late Eighteenth Century Viennese Garden John A. Rice Memoirs of the Vol. 258 - $70 ISBN-10: 0-87169-258-9 |
Between 1796 and 1800 Baron Peter von Braun, a rich businessman and manager of Vienna's court theaters, transformed his estate at Schönau into an English-style landscape park. Among several buildings with which he embellished his garden, the most remarkable and celebrated was the Temple of Night, a domed rotunda accessible only through a meandering rockwork grotto that led visitors to believe that their destination lay somewhere deep underground. A life-size statue of the goddess Night on a chariot pulled by two horses presided over the Temple, while from the dome, which depicted the night sky, came the sounds of a mechanical musical instrument that visitors likened to music of the spheres.
Only the ruins of the Temple of Night survive, and it has received little scholarly attention. This book brings it back to life by assembling the many descriptions of it by early nineteenth-century eyewitnesses. Placing the Temple within the context of the eighteenth-century English landscape park and of Viennese culture in the fascinating period of transition between Enlightenment and Biedermeier, Rice's book will appeal to anyone interested in the history of garden design, architecture, theater, and music.
John A. Rice, an independent scholar who lives in Rochester, Minnesota, studied music history at the University of California, Berkeley [Ph.D., 1987]. He has written many articles on eighteenth-century music and three books: W. A. Mozart: La Clemenza di Tito [1991], Antonio Salieri and Viennese Opera [1997], and Empress Marie Therese and Music at the Viennese Court, 1792-1807.
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The Library of Benjamin Franklin Edwin Wolf 2nd and Memoirs of the Vol. 257 - $100.00 ISBN-10: 0-87169-257-0 |
(Joint publication with the American Philosophical Society and The Library Company of Philadelphia)
Beginning in the late 1950s, Edwin Wolf 2nd embarked on a bibliographic odyssey to reconstruct the "lost" library of Benjamin Franklin. Franklin's library, the largest and best private library at the time of his death in 1790, was sold by his grandson in the late eighteenth century to Robert Morris Jr., who subsequently sold it in the early nineteenth century. None of the catalogues of the collection survive, and the contents of the library were virtually unknown until 1956, when Wolf discovered the unique shelfmarks Franklin used to identify his books. Wolf's work to reconstruct a catalogue of the library continued for the next thirty years but was unfinished at the time of his death. As the tercentenary of Franklin's birth approached, Kevin J. Hayes took up the work and has continued to discover titles that were part of the library. Everything found to date, close to 4,000 entries, has been compiled here.