Serendipities: Language And Lunacy - Softcover

Eco, Prof Umberto

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0752826476 ISBN 13: 9780752826479

Publisher: Orion, 1999

Synopsis

* Serendipities is an iconoclastic, dazzlingly erudite and witty demonstration, by one of the world's most brilliant thinkers, of how myths and lunacies can produce historical developments of no small significance. In Eco's words, 'even errors can produce interesting side effects'.
* Eco's book shows how:
-- believers in a flat earth helped Columbus accidentally discover America
-- how the medieval myth of Prester John, the Christian king in Asia, assisted the European drive eastward
-- how the myth of the Rosicrucians affected the Masons, leading in turn to the widespread belief in a Jewish masonic plot to dominate the world and other forms of paranoid antisemitism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
-- how the fruitless quest to discover the language used by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden helped shape the modern science of linguistics

'Umberto Eco is a polymath to an extent most will regard as practically inhuman.' Frank Kermode, NYRB

About this title

Review:

"Examines, with wit and elegance, some of the many cases in which a mistaken belief has led to a sound result . . . Delightful."-The Atlantic Monthly "Rich in historical anecdotes . . . Throughout, his treatments are informative, intellectually sophisticated, and thoroughly entertaining."-Library Journal

From the Publisher:

The Uses of Error
In Serendipities, Umberto Eco unlocks the riddles of history in an exploration of those stories told by scholars, scientists, poets, fanatics and ordinary people in order to make sense of the world.

In a careful unravelling of the fabulous and the false, Eco shows us how serendipities – unanticipated truths – often spring from mistaken ideas. From Leibnitz's belief that I Ching illustrated the principles of calculus to Marco Polo's mistaken identification of a rhinoceros for a unicorn, Eco tours the labyrinth of intellectual history, illuminating the ways in which we project the familiar onto the strange. He shows how Columbus' assumption that the world was much smaller than it is led him to seek out a quick route to the East via the West and thus fortuitously 'discover' America; and how the fictions that grew up around the cults of the Rosicrucians and Knights Templar were the result of a letter from the mysterious 'Prester John' – undoubtedly a hoax – that provided fertile ground for a series of delusions and conspiracy theories based on religious, ethnic and racial prejudices. While some false tales produce new knowledge (like Columbus' discovery of America) and others create nothing but horror and shame (the Rosicrucian story wound up fuelling European anti-Semitism) they are all, Eco shows, powerfully persuasive.

With the startling combination of erudition and wit, bewildering anecdotes and scholarly rigour that are Umberto Eco's hallmarks, Serendipities is sure to entertain and enlighten any reader with a passion for the curious history of languages and ideas..

About this edition

• Publisher: Orion
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0752826476
• ISBN 13: 9780752826479
• Binding: Paperback