Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) by Glassie John

Author:Glassie, John
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin USA
Published: 2012-10-17T16:00:00+00:00

15

Philosophical Transactions

Three years after the plague subsided in Rome, the Tiber flooded, having the greatest effect on the Jewish ghetto. Alexander VII spent much of his time in the Palazzo Quirinale with his wooden scale model of the streets and buildings of the city, contemplating his improvement projects. Although unenthusiastic about matters of government, he was given respect for the success of Rome’s efforts against the plague, and he had done his part in 1657 by sending the papal fleet to join Venetian ships at the Battle of the Dardanelles, part of the ongoing war with the Ottoman Empire over Crete. He’d also bowed to tradition with regard to nepotism; a little more than a year after his election his brother and nephews had gone on the payroll.

Despite Kircher’s previous output, he had only begun to become, as a twenty-first-century historian has put it, “a book-making, knowledge-regurgitating machine.” In 1658, he published Ecstatic Journey II, a precursor of a planned volume on the physical earth called Underground World that was going to take several more years to complete. In 1660, after the first major eruption of Mount Vesuvius in three decades, Kircher traveled down to Naples to investigate an apparent miracle. Crosses had mysteriously begun to appear in the folds of people’s clothes, aprons, bed linens, and other fabrics. Kircher the skeptic determined that the causes were natural, not miraculous, a result of the ash in the air—though this didn’t mean that God wasn’t responsible for them. A book on the subject naturally followed.

Also on Kircher’s agenda in the years after the plague: ingratiating himself with the new Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna. After Ferdinand III died in 1657, his seventeen-year-old son, Leopold, king of Bohemia and Hungary, succeeded him. The child of married first cousins, Leopold himself happened to be first cousins with Louis XIV of France. He was born with what became known as the Hapsburg chin—a greatly protruding jaw and almost monstrous lower lip—the result of so much inbreeding among European royalty. (His nickname: Hogmouth.) Like his father, and like other kings and queens whose subjects, peers, and family members spoke many different tongues, Leopold had a practical interest in crossing the divide of language. At the same time, because he frequently wanted to keep others from being able to read and understand his secret missives and official directives, he’d developed an interest in cryptography. For Leopold, Kircher produced both an attempt at a universal language that would allow any two parties to communicate and a system of artificial languages or codes by which only certain people could.

In fact, the possibility of a universal language was frequently discussed during the seventeenth century by the likes of Descartes, Leibniz, and many others. In the early 1650s, for example, the Englishman Francis Lodwick proposed one in a book called The Groundwork or Foundation Laid (or So Intended) for the Framing of a New Perfect Language and a Universal Common Writing. In 1657, another Englishman, Cave Beck, published his proposal

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