"A fascinating portrait of a well-known scholar at work on a little-known project. Carhart's treatment of Leibniz's informal practices of scholarship, his use of long-distance correspondence and social networks, and indeed of Leibniz's idiosyncrasies as a scholar is very well done. The author has done an excellent job of connecting a diverse body of material in lively and engaging prose."
"A fascinating study of the role of historical linguistics in the work and the network of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Extremely well written, with a love for scientific practice, this is a masterful, remarkably detailed book."
"This is an extraordinary and wonderful book. It reads like a novel—like a detective story—although it is the result of painstaking scholarship. Michael C. Carhart reconstructs virtually month by month Leibniz's tireless efforts to build networks in order to gain information about the languages of Asia."
"This ground-breaking book takes the reader on a fascinating journey. In a gripping narrative entirely grounded on virtually unstudied sources, Leibniz's discovery of Asia unfolds through his investigation of its languages, against the backdrop of the multilayered circulation of knowledge in an increasingly global world and the dawn of modern comparative linguistics."
"Leibniz Discovers Asia details Leibniz's linguistic quest to uncover the origins of peoples. In this fascinating and deeply researched work, Carhart analyzes how Leibniz assembled information and constructed his massive correspondence network to explore history before history. Carhart is a witty raconteur and a knowledgeable guide to one of the most influential thinkers of the baroque Republic of Letters."
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