Lewis' volume is a meticulous historical analysis of the “artificial language” movement that flourished in England between the time of Francis Bacon, whose Advancement of Learning gave it its impetus, and that of John Locke, whose refutation of its aims sealed its fate. This is a finely written work of remarkable erudition that should be of interest to intellectual historians of seventeenth-century England. Unfortunately, it retains too much of the narrow focus of the doctoral dissertation to appeal to a broader readership. This is not for lack of ability; the author shows a sure hand with linguistic and philosophical material. Perhaps the most interesting chapter, a historical “Discursus” on artificial language, religion, and the occult, ranges from Ramon Lull's Ars brevis to a succinct exposition of Hobbes' linguistic ideas. But unless the reader has a professional interest in the day-to-day interactions of the principal “language planners” and their associates, the eight-page conclusion tells us all we need to know about their ill-fated project, which exemplifies the rocky transition between medieval and early modern epistemology.

The author gives more weight to sorting out the surprisingly well-preserved correspondence between those involved in this project than to analyzing its productions. In the chapter devoted to the most significant work of the movement, John Wilkins' 1668 An Essay toward a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, only three pages actually describe this 454-folio-page tome's four sections. A couple of sample pages are all we see of Wilkins' attempt—by his own standards, more proof of concept than final achievement—to create a “real character,” which, by mirroring the universal “character” of human thought, if not of reality itself, would lift the curse of Babel by providing polyglot humanity with a universal “philosophical language.”

The density of Lewis' documentation might have permitted a more sociological approach focused on the network of intellectual associations, from the Royal Society on down, within which all this activity took place. Beyond Bacon's abstract and noncommittal hopes for a “philosophical grammar” to undo what Lewis calls “the barriers to human progress that had been erected in the aftermath of Babel” (16), one would like to hear more about the impetus to the artificial/universal language movement provided by such external factors as the growth of international commerce. To what extent did natural science's increasingly confident replacement of Aristotelian essences by mathematical formulae give rise to the illusion that natural language could be reformed on the model—frequently alluded to—of arithmetic, whose “Arabic” numerals are untouched by Babel? Lewis might also have paid more attention to the theological context of the movement, which involved numerous clergymen such as Wilkins himself and operated in a more or less deeply assumed biblical framework, seeking to undo not merely Babel but, to the extent possible in our fallen world, the Fall itself.

To sum up, Lewis has given us an admirably comprehensive account of vast intellectual energies expended in a chimerical effort. Hobbes, we may recall, devoted a good deal of time to trying to square the circle.