A clue to the breadth of reference and the probing enthusiasm of this engaging book is to be found in its subtitle: "How Glass Changed the World".
Although its small size and format suggest a novel, its eccentric, yet fundamentally anthropological approach is suggested by its cover illustration. Here, the vital, if eccentric, role the authors consider that glass has played in the "peculiar development of a visual, experimental, rationalistic, 'scientific' and realistic world", leading to "the revolutionary developments in the generation of reliable knowledge . . . upon which our world is founded", is exemplified by a detail from a mediaeval miniature. Alexander the Great, crowned and robed, is depicted interestedly observing the fish of the sea, sitting inside a transparent glass diving-bell (or bathyscaphe), suspended from chains by two courtiers in a royal sailing boat.
What makes this book more original and interesting than a conventional history of world glass is the broadly based, synthetic approach taken by Alan Macfarlane, Professor of Anthropological Science at Cambridge University and Gerry Martin, a glass instrument historian and co-founder of Eurotherm Ltd. Rather than charting the usual linear technological developments, uses, forms and styles of glass, listing major names and places, their mission is to try and work out why Western Europeans have developed and expanded the scientific possibilities of glass so much further than potentially equally well-informed earlier or contemporary Asian cultures. They want to discover why the Chinese, Japanese, Indians and even the Romans, for example, didn't develop glass beyond the aesthetic, functional and virtuoso, even for spectacles or mirrors, such seminal aids in Western man's perception of himself and his world from the Renaissance onwards. How has glass played such a seminal role in effecting change in our modern society? What interests them is the "history of glass as a technology of thought".
In their quest to discover why the social history of glass has been studied so unholistically, the authors' methodological approach has been to focus upon sociological, cultural, religious and empirical issues as well as material, optical and theoretical developments during selected periods. Then they compare the circumstances in which people made or did not make glass vessels, jewellery, sheets, prisms or instruments. In their desire to demonstrate what a crucial part glass has played in shifting the balance of power from that of the mind to the positivist, experimental emphasis on the eye, they set out to assert the role of glass in "the knowledge revolution of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, comprising the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution" and what the implications of this have been. To try and do this, they have navigated accounts by historians of art, technology and science, anthropologists, biologists, chemists and opthalmologists, travelling from Mesopotamia to Venice, charting the fundamental role played by the early mediaeval Arabic scientists, inheritors of the ancient knowledge of the Oriental and Islamic worlds. A huge task, you may say, but one which is surprisingly easy to read, as well as being interestingly informative and clearly recounted.
The text is divided into nine sections, which despite their chronological axis, are driven by the authors' observations on artistic representation, humans' perceptions of themselves and their world, what they term "the development of the technology of enchantment" in the exploration of perceived reality and the appropriation of available crafted skills for scientific means. They are particularly interesting on mirrors, spectacles, the Chinese and Japanese preference for porcelain, clay and quartz, the causes and effects of myopia, and differences between the Oriental "industrious" and Western "industrialized" peoples. They pepper their text with lively quotations from Dr Johnson, Alexander Pope and Leonardo da Vinci, probably their hero. They use an easy reference system (no footnotes, but sources for quotes, further reading suggestions, an almost evangelical appendix on 'The Role of Glass in Twenty Experiments that Changed the World', a good bibliography and index, and a section on 'Types of Glass'), grouped at the end of the book. They engagingly employ popular allusions, e.g. to Marilyn Monroe's hunt for a prematurely spectacled man in Some Like it Hot (necessitated by his habitual reading of the tiny stock exchange reports) and to the Eeyore Effect, where Eeyore's disappointingly empty honey pot was replaced by the marvellous potential of Piglet's burst balloon, a "Useful Pot for Putting Things In" - "appropriately enough", the authors note, "another use of glass". Such unexpected factors, apparently, are noticed daily by anthropologists in cultural transformation, and are typical of the seemingly irrational sequence of events the authors relish.
Nicola Gordon Bowe is an art historian teaching at the National College of Art and Design. She is the author of many books on the Arts and Crafts Movement in Ireland
The Glass Bathyscaphe. By Alan Macfarlane and Gerry Martin. Profile Books, 255 pp. £15