Science, art and nature in medieval and modern thought

Southern Question is perhaps the weakest aspect of this book. In the conclusion, he not only condemns Giolitti's strategy during the epidemic but also links it to the persistent failure of government policy in the South throughout the Liberal period (1860 to 1922). However, this analysis of Southern politics is rooted firmly in a Gramscian-Marxist account of the Liberal state and treats southern "backwardness" and "corruption" as unproblematic concepts. It is a great pity that Snowden does not have more to say about recent revisionist approaches to the Southern Question, which have challenged such conceptual certainties. The originality of Naples in the time of cholera lies in its documenting and comparing later epidemics (1884 with 1911). Yet the impression remains that the author could have done more with what he has found. Snowden's new evidence from Naples is used to add to, and occasionally chip away at, an established narrative. Although he discusses the international impact of the Naples epidemic, he fails to compare the ways different countries responded to the disease. It is also surprising to find so little exploration of popular images of the disease, particularly in a book which devotes so much space to urban poverty and protest. As a result, Snowden's study of Naples does not actually add a great deal to our general understanding of cholera epidemics. The capacity of cholera "to provide a revealing shaft of light by means of which to explore the structure and workings of European society" (p. 3) has already been conclusively demonstrated by Richard Evans for Hamburg (Death in Hamburg, Oxford, 1987). Snowden is simply able to confirm, in a colourful and often compelling narrative, that this is the case for Naples too. This collection of twenty-three articles and reviews first published between 1956 and 1993 is a companion to Science, optics and music in medieval and early modern thought, which was published by Hambledon six years ago. Appearing in the last year of his life, it is a fitting monument to Alistair Crombie's vision of Western science as an enduring tradition of rational argument and controlled experimental practice that is unique within the history of human civilization. Like a succession of geological strata exposed in a quarry, the articles presented here offer a means of reconstructing the principal lines of development in Crombie's oeuvre during his lifetime. It also includes a 'Further Bibliography' of his writings intended to …