I am apparently well mad for the seventeenth century at the minute. Here I am with another book about the English Civil War. This one is a murder mystery. It tells the same story from four different perspectives. It’s a really fun mishmash of all kinds of ideas: Venetian travelers, cadaver acquisition, Royalist plots, Quakers, mental health problems, you name it. The part I found most striking was the fierce debate about whether experimentation was the right way to build scientific understanding. This sounds bizarre: like, obviously it is? How else are you supposed to know anything? But in the seventeenth century this was a revolutionary idea, with most people thinking it was presumptuous to question the wisdom of the ancients. It’s a bit like when I found out that people used to object (!) to handwashing. There is something so fun about finding out how constructed your worldview is.
AN INSTANCE OF THE FINGERPOST by Iain Pears
