Hands-on science in the Age of Exploration.

Winner of the John Lyman Book Award in Naval and Maritime Science and Technology by the North American Society for Oceanic History and the Leo Gershoy Prize by the American Historical Association

Throughout the Age of Exploration, European maritime communities bent on colonial and commercial expansion embraced the complex mechanics of celestial navigation. They developed schools, textbooks, and instruments to teach the new mathematical techniques to sailors. As these experts debated the value of theory and practice, memory and mathematics, they created hybrid models that would have a lasting impact on applied science.

In Sailing School, a richly illustrated comparative study of this transformative period, Margaret E. Schotte charts more than two hundred years of navigational history as she investigates how mariners solved the challenges of navigating beyond sight of land. She begins by outlining the influential sixteenth-century Iberian model for training and certifying nautical practitioners. She takes us into a Dutch bookshop stocked with maritime manuals and a French trigonometry lesson devoted to the idea that "navigation is nothing more than a right triangle." The story culminates at the close of the eighteenth century with a young British naval officer who managed to keep his damaged vessel afloat for two long months, thanks largely to lessons he learned as a keen student.

This is the first study to trace the importance, for the navigator's art, of the world of print. Schotte interrogates a wide variety of archival records from six countries, including hundreds of published textbooks and never-before-studied manuscripts crafted by practitioners themselves. Ultimately, Sailing School helps us to rethink the relationship among maritime history, the Scientific Revolution, and the rise of print culture during a period of unparalleled innovation and global expansion.

Margaret E. Schotte is an assistant professor of history at York University.

Margaret E. Schotte's profile page

• Winner, John Lyman Book Award
• Winner, Leo Gershoy Prize

"The history of getting from A to B is usually told as the history of instruments... But Margaret Schotte, in her excellent Sailing School, argues convincingly that the history of how ships, people, and goods move across vast distances must also be, perhaps quite centrally, a history of the book. Sailing School is a history of how early modern navigators learned to become navigators, and it holds important lessons for early modern knowledge as a whole."

Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society

"Sailing School is and extremely informative look into the practice and transmission of navigational knowledge in Europe during the scientific revolution, and how text helped to codify and communicate that information to new practitioners."

Nautical Research Journal

"It is immediately clear that Schotte knows how to draw readers into sweeping historic events, enriching the story with detail and accuracy to inspire awe... From technical advancements to highly charged personal stories, Schotte's book is a fascinating read."

yFile - York University's News

"Sailing School provides us with a technically researched history of navigational pedagogy with enough captivating prose to transport the reader into the decisions and methods of educators in classrooms from past centuries... Schotte has produced an exceptional history of education for a snapshot of time within a highly technical field."

EH.Net

"Schotte's book is an important contribution to maritime history and absolutely should be on the shelf of all interested in the details of seafaring life in the age of sail, as well as those studying Europe's centuries of expansion and conquest. I strongly recommend this book accordingly."

The Northern Mariner

"It is the immediacy of its subject matter that makes Sailing School so richly fascinating... Multinational in its approach, it offers insights into what was distinctive about pedagogy and practice in England, Spain, France and the Netherlands, and analysis of the extent to which knowledge and expertise were shared and transferred – not least through the medium of print. What one 17th-century teacher called 'This Art of Traversing and Caravanning over Neptune's Vast Dominions' has found in Schotte a gifted, lucid and illuminating chronicler."

Literary Review

"Schotte, in combination with Johns Hopkins University Press, has produced a beautifully illustrated, perceptively argued, well-written monograph that enhances historical understandings of not just early modern navigation, but also of early modern technical education and the lived experience of the pre-industrial maritime world. Sailing School exemplifies the kind of original work that close archival research can yield and will be a definitive work on its subject for years to come."

Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies

"Sailing School deploys compelling printed images and manuscript notations to reconstruct the practice of learning, a particularly difficult feat for a phenomenon that takes place in an intangible mental realm. In fusing the history of learning and print with that of navigation, Schotte shows how deep transformations in public intellectual culture built on themselves."

Times Higher Education

"As voyages stretched into open ocean, mathematical expertise in celestial navigation became essential. Hands-on instruction with instruments remained key, but as historian Margaret Schotte reveals in this deft, scholarly chronicle, the nautical manual soon came into its own."

Nature

"[A] valuable academic study. Sailing School is well-written with copious documentation."

Captain Cook Society

"Schotte's book is a very important and highly relevant book for all interested in the technologies of the seas in the early modern period."

Technology and Culture

"Sailing School, with its comparative analysis of academic traditions and training practices across Europe, is a magnificent contribution in the fields of History, History of Education, Pedagogy, Sociology, and Science in general. Margaret Schotte shows that "navigators were not born but made", enriching with new data and interpretations the history of knowledge in the Early Modern period. With a rigorous investigation and a brilliant narrative, she brings the European nautical science of the 16th and 17th centuries directly into the Scientific Revolution."

RUTTER Book Review