Journal of Glass Studies (review)

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 481 and Glick shows with a wealth of examples the complex process by which scientific knowledge was transferred from one culture to another. Once again he discards the old and tired explanations and finds Christians, Muslims, and Jews united by their common scientific interests. He ends the book on the same note in which it began, with a critique of current historiography and the positing of new explana­ tions for cultural crystallization. This is an important and courageous book. Important because it advances so many interesting and novel ideas. If read with an open mind, it should lead to a productive and necessary debate among Hispanists. It is also an excellent contribution to our understanding of technical and scientific developments in medieval Spain. Courageous because Glick has not feared to point out the dogmatism of historical orthodoxies. In doing so, Glick has recast the boundaries of the disci­ pline. Courageous because the author clearly shows that the technical and cultural interests, the bonds we all share as human beings, are often stronger than the barriers which are erected by ethnic, political, and religious strife; thus, his hope for mankind in Spain and elsewhere shines through. Teofilo F. Ruiz* Journal of Glass Studies. Vol. 20. Corning N.Y.: Corning Museum of Glass, 1978. Pp. 163. $15.00. This number of the elegant annual produced by the Corning Museum of Glass is rather heavily loaded down by the three long articles of specialist technological interest which form the bulk of its pages. Lighter material for the collector and glass fancier is provided by eight pages of pictures of recent acquisitions made by public and private collections in the United States and abroad; and a thirty-page (three cols, each) list of articles and books on glass published in 1977. To start from the end: Robert H. Brill writes on “The Use of Equilibrated Silica Gel for the Protection of Glass with Incipient Crizzling,” a condition which threatens many pieces of European, East Asiatic, and American glass­ es manufactured between the 17th and 19th centuries. The longest item (fifty-three pages) is one of great potential inter­ est, for it involves keen detective work by museologists to expose what must be one of the biggest and most blatant “glass forgeries” of the 19th (or perhaps any) century. The article and catalog of faked specimens, by Helmut Rieke of the Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, is in German. Dr. Ruiz is associate professor of history at Brooklyn College. 482 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The forgeries involved the fascinating “coppen met serpenten,” elaborate, dragon-stemmed goblets in the Venetian style produced in the Netherlands in the 16th or 17th century. Hardly a museum or collection of note is without its valued specimen. It now appears that large quantities of these glasses did not emerge from the furnaces of the emigrant Venetians who established the crystal glass industry in the Netherlands in the 16th century, but were lamp-blown products made in Hamburg in the late 19th century. RobertJ. Charleston’s article, “Glass Furnaces through the Ages,” is detailed but written in a lucid style which makes for good reading. As we are informed in a footnote, the article was compiled a number of years ago but has been brought up to date in some sections where new developments have rendered previous views obsolete and has been furnished with a substantial critical apparatus of notes. It follows in its main lines the writer’s contribution on “Glass” to C. Singer et al., A History of Technology (Oxford, 1957), vol. 3. The subject of glassmaking furnaces is discussed in thirty-five pages and is enlivened with a large variety of illustrations including medieval manuscripts, scientihc treatises, fanciful representations on glass vessels and gold boxes, and even an oil painting of the Medici glassworks in Florence in 1570, complete with cupids. The Middle East is passed over rather hastily, perhaps because when the article was originally written less was known about glassmaking processes there than now. The writer begins with the glassmaking installations found at el-Amarna, brief capital of the heretic Pharaoh Akhenaten, of the eighteenth Dynasty (1375-1358 b.c.), which Flinders

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