Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575–1725. Vera Keller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. x + 350 pp. $99.99. (Book Review)
In this intriguing and impressive book, Vera Keller presents a history of the desiderata that appeared in early modern Europe. These wish lists responded to public interest by pursuing projects likely to advance the common good. Among the favorite desired things, recurring across two centuries, were perpetual lamps, flexible glass, diving bells, the philosopher’s stone, the Alkahest (or universal solvent), and perpetual motion. During the same period, some of these were cited as impossibilities by other list makers, thereby contrasting the promises of charlatans with more considered inventories of things objectively needed by society or lacking in a branch of knowledge. At the start of the 1600s, desiderata mainly comprised lost inventions and natural processes: for example, Guido Pancirolli’s Two Books of Things Lost and Things Found (1599–1602) encouraged the idea that lost ancient knowledge could be restored by the moderns (see his sixty-five lost things on 48–49). Later, desiderata set out the direction of future, increasingly specialized, research that would discover new knowledge.