Timon Screech, "The Shogun's Silver Telescope: God, Art, and Money in the English Quest for Japan, 1600-1625" (Oxford UP, 2020)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Oct 7, 2021 · 47m

An English mission to Japan arrives in 1613 with all the standard English commodities, including wool and cloth: which the English hope to trade for Japanese silver. But there’s a gift for the Shogun among them: a silver telescope. As Timon Screech explains in his latest book, The Shogun’s Silver Telescope: God, Art, and Money in the English Quest for Japan, 1600-1625 (Oxford University Press, 2020), there was a lot of meaning behind that telescope. It represented an English state trying to chart its own part as a Protestant country, denoting their support for science and a more open culture…