When Linda Dalrymple Henderson's The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art first appeared in 1983 it generated a lively discussion, most conspicuously in the pages of the journal Leonardo. Here was a book that undermined two of the central tenets of modernist theory: first that developments in art and science were linked not by any real connections or strong form of shared endeavour but by the fact that both partook of the modern spirit or zeitgeist; second, and more specifically, that Einsteinian relativity and cubism were in some way analogous embodiments of that spirit. By relentlessly pursuing the fate of two nineteenth-century developments – the non-Euclidean geometries and higher dimensions of her title – Henderson clearly showed that many of the avant-garde artworks so admired by critics for their formal innovation were at once more literal and more bizarre than anyone had previously suspected. Some were attempts to expound the ‘geometrical occult’ or to engage in multidimensional communion, some projected the enhanced intellect of ‘four-dimensional man’ and others explored the lonely but profound reaches of hyperspace. As she puts it in the ‘Re-introduction’ to this new edition of The Fourth Dimension, ‘these works function as “windows” on an invisible meta-reality of higher dimensions and etherial energies' (p. 27), and, elsewhere, ‘belief in a fourth dimension encouraged artists to depart from visual reality and to reject completely the one-point perspective system that for centuries had portrayed the world as three-dimensional’ (p. 492).

In his 1551 Travagliata invenzione, the Italian mathematician Niccolò Tartaglia described a device for raising sunken ships. Despite his claim of originality, his contemporary Girolamo Cardano had described a similar method in his famous work De subtilitate, which was published a year before. A comparison between these methods reveals the uniqueness of Tartaglia's approach, for he combines an explicit defence of the horror vacui principle with an implicit negation of rarefaction. In this article I show the complexities of this conception and stress the importance of keeping the personal argument between both authors in mind when interpreting their descriptions of wreck-salvage operations.

Nuclear history always compels. Scholars (and readers) can immerse themselves in the existential threat posed by the atomic bomb and its successor weapons, the tantalizing prospect of carbon-free energy, or the study of a natural phenomenon deeply at odds with our everyday experience of the world. There is thus always something profound at stake when we write nuclear history – be it physical, economic or intellectual. And while it may seem that the end of the Cold War should have diminished the academic attention accorded to the subject, it actually just allowed the historiography to evolve. To the wealth of technical and political studies that once dominated nuclear history, we can now add a host of excellent cultural, environmental, literary and transnational studies. Those of us who entered the field shortly after the break-up of the Soviet Union have been able to follow these developments first-hand, from the initial uncertainty of where nuclear history would go without its original raison d’être to seeing the possibilities opened up in a post-Cold War world. The books under review here provide important and timely additions to this historiography. Luis A. Campos's Radium and the Secret Life provides a rigorous and compelling account of the uses of radium in early twentieth-century biology; Timothy J. Jorgensen's Strange Glow: The Story of Radiation offers an accessible and illuminating analysis of the benefits and risks of radiation. The books also make for a fascinating juxtaposition. They complement each other well, but also contain some intriguing differences that allow us to reflect on the nature of nuclear history in the early twenty-first century.

Imagine a scene sometime in the 1750s in the depths of west Wales. This was wild country. Even a century later, George Borrow called it a ‘mountainous wilderness … a waste of russet-coloured hills, with here and there a black craggy summit’. Through this desolation rides the Reverend William Williams. As he rode, he read – and the book in his saddlebags on this occasion was William Derham's Astro-Theology, first published some twenty years earlier. Williams was a leading figure in the Methodist revolution that had been sweeping through Wales for the past two decades. Disenchanted with an Anglican Church that seemed increasingly disconnected – culturally and linguistically – from their everyday lives, and attracted by powerful and charismatic preachers like Williams himself, men and women across Wales turned to Methodism. They organized themselves into local groups worshipping in meeting houses rather than in their parish churches. Leaders like Williams usually had a number of such groups under their care, and spent much of their time on horseback, travelling between widely scattered communities to minister to their congregations. That Williams read in the saddle is well known. As shall become clear, he had certainly read Derham's book as well. It is not too much of an imaginative leap, therefore, to picture him reading about God's design of the cosmos as he rode through the Welsh hills – and it is a good image with which to begin a discussion about Wales, science and European peripheries.

Fermentation is a cornerstone phenomenon in Cartesian physiology, accounting for processes such as digestion or blood formation. I argue that the previously unrecognized conceptual tension between the terms ‘fermentation’ and ‘concoction’ reflects Descartes's efforts towards a novel, more thoroughly mechanistic theory of physiology, set up against both Galenism and chymistry. Similarities with chymistry as regards fermentation turn out either epistemologically superficial, or based on shared earlier sources. Descartes tentatively employs ‘fermentation’ as a less teleological alternative to ‘concoction’, later renouncing the explicit use of the term, possibly to avoid chymical overtones. However, his continued use of analogies with fermentative processes in the natural world and in winemaking, coupled with a strong ontological commitment (the stance that the physiological processes are actual fermentations), leads to a reintroduction of natural teleology in his medical system, which I argue may be understood in an Aristotelian sense of ‘simple necessity’. The paper reveals a more nuanced account of Cartesian fermentative medicine, delineating some of its tensions with regard to chymistry as they play out in the dynamics of fermentation and concoction, and linking the analogies to fermentation processes to the difficulties in erasing teleology altogether.