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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . The MIT Press and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Interdisciplinary History. This content downloaded from 169.229.32.138 on Fri, 9 May 2014 07:12:03 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REVIEWS | 297Ruestow's emphasis on the personal element seems the likeliest way to explain the remarkable achievements of Swammerdam and Leewenhoek, their individual skills spurred by competition with others (like Malpighi). His approach also allows him the freedom to reflect on Swammerdam's expressions of personal inadequacy, and on Leeuwenhoek's obsessions, which often made the comments of his fellow townspeople as important as the discussions of his more learned and cosmopolitan contemporaries.Ruestow is also sensitive to the technical possibilities, social frameworks, and philosophical debates that set the terms for their work. He relies on a mass of printed sources in Latin, Dutch, and other languages for evidence, while also incorporating an impressive body of secondary literature. His methods constitute no historiographical breakthrough, but his painstaking and generous study weaves together the general and the particular to create a rich story. For instance, he provides one of the most lucid and informed discussions of the magnificent achievements of Dutch anatomy available in English, as well as an equally impressive analysis of arguments about the generation of living organisms (and spontaneous generation).Ruestow happily carries his story into England, France, Italy, and Germany when he deems it necessary, and he extends it as late as the early nineteenth century and the development of cell theory to explain the apparent decline and reemergence of microscopy as a front-line scientific tool. Thus, although centered on the Netherlands and the work of Swammerdam and Leeuwenhoek, Ruestow has written a wide-ranging account of microscopy through the early I83os. It is an invaluable contribution to our increasingly complex account of the growth of early modern science.

Reviews of Joan of Arc books often rightly begin by asking whether there is the need for yet another book on Joan of Arc. In the case of biographies, one is tempted to answer, no. The known facts have not changed over 600 years, and new angles from which her life can be approached do not emerge as often as do new biographies. Oddly, however, the kind of detailed comparative study of Joan’s afterlife in England through four centuries, which Gail Orgelfinger has accomplished in this vigorous new book, still needs to be done for French chronicles (no less) and much of her French afterlife.