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THE DOCTOR AND THE HISTORIAN Europe's Physician: The Various Life of Sir Theodore de Mayerne, by Hugh Trevor-Roper; Yale University Press, 2006, $59.95.
IN HIS Times Literary Supplement review of July 16, David Wootton concluded:
no young scholar would want to write this book, and perhaps no young scholar could. But if you want to understand the age of religious wars, or if you want to be reminded that the purpose of a great history book, as of a great play or a great novel, is to transform how you see the world around you, then you should read this last relic of a lost age.
Wootton's pessimism about history at the moment is understandable but perhaps unwarranted. Certainly Trevor-Roper's "last subject" is based on sources in Latin, French and Greek; and the reader needs at least a working knowledge of the Reformation in Europe to understand one of the book's main themes--the destruction of international Protestantism in the seventeenth century. However thanks to History I at the University of Sydney 1959 (taught brilliantly by Bruce Mansfield and Ken Cable) I had no problems, and if Trevor-Roper had been able to write his planned "reflective introduction" neither I suspect would most readers.
As for the young scholars brought up on a diet of cultural studies with its incoherent interweaving of dubious material from a range of subjects, the depth of Trevor-Roper's research may indeed be intimidating. He moves across many disciplines in this biography of a now little-known royal doctor but he had more than earned the right. Clearly Trevor-Roper had mastered the political, religious, social, art and medical history required for such a narrative.
The book is also a... |
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