Memories were short and history unkind. It was the way of the world.

Pamela Smith and Benjamin Schmidt have gathered together a wide-ranging and provocative set of original essays that successfully demonstrate how contingent the process of making knowledge was during a period of fundamental epistemological change. This is a finely crafted and conceptualized collection.

I know,I can smell it, too.

My experiences thus far had me planning to throttle the first Tudor historian I met upon my return for gross dereliction of duty.

These days vampires gravitated toward particle accelerators, projects to decode the genome, and molecular biology. Once they had flocked to alchemy, anatomy, and electricity. If it went bang, involved blood, or promised to unlock the secrets of the universe, there was sure to be a vampire around.

It was a brutal picture, a tug-of-war between two equal but opposing impulses. It had the ring of truth, however.

I wanted to know how humans came up with a view of the world that had so little magic in it. I needed to understand how they convinced themselves that magic wasn’t important.