Looking at the world through the spectacles of 18th and 19th century knowledge, Alain Corbin imagines how people thought about physical reality by reconstructing what they didn’t know. Terra Incognita is fascinating for recollecting the widespread environmental calamity caused by the Great Lisbon Earthquake (1755), triggering a 19-foot tsunami that swept away 10,000 lives. Worse still was the eruption of several volcanoes across the world in 1783, which dimmed sunlight, caused trees to shed their leaves in June and was accused of spreading unknown diseases.
Much of the book by the Sorbonne history professor examines the emergence of science at a time when an elite minority began to travel more widely to examine volcanoes, glaciers and polar ice at close hand. Many of the names he cites will be unfamiliar to English-speaking readers. Apparently, French explorers and scientists are given less attention in our history books than the familiar names of their British and American counterparts.
