If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from 1434?
Would you ever listen to anything by Gavin Menzies again? My advice: go read some credible historical texts about the Chinese treasure fleet. It's too bad, because even without that, the parts of the book that are factual would've already been mind-blowing enough, there's no need to turn it into fiction just to make it a few percent sexier. But sadly, when you look at actual historical scholarship, many of the things Menzies writes about (like the Chinese fleet getting to Venice, the crux of the book) are crank speculations lacking any evidence. If it were all fiction, that'd be fine, it'd be literature. Or, rather, some of it's true, some of it isn't, which's arguably worse, because then you can't tell the difference. Though Menzies writes engagingly, his assumption that the Chinese fleet landed a delegation in Florence is highly speculative, and hardly substantiated by any facts (Alberti could just have easily learned perspective from classical sources the Greeks knew about the relationship between perception of length and distance in the 1st Century BCE).This book was blowing my mind. Menzies sets the stage by recapitulating arguments from his first book, including the ingenious method for calculating longitude that Chinese navigators may have used. There, they provided the knowledge and technique-introducing the painter Alberti, for instance, to the methods of perspective drawing-that sparked the Renaissance. His thesis in both works is based on the seven (historically undisputed) voyages undertaken by a large Chinese sailing fleet between 14 while it is known that they traveled as far as east Africa, Menzies believes that they landed in Italy and sent a delegation to the Council of Venice, held in Florence in 1439. In Menzies's 1421, the amateur historian advanced a highly controversial hypothesis, that the Chinese discovered America in this follow-up, he credits the Renaissance not to classical Greek and Roman ideals (a ""Eurocentric view of history"") but again to the Chinese.
0 kommentar(er)
