Author: Katherine Walker

Claire Hansen, Shakespeare and Complexity Theory (Oxford: Routledge 2017) 222 pp. £105 Hb. ISBN: 9781138291287 Early modern literary studies is witnessing renewed interest in the period’s understanding of knowledge production. From the framework of disknowledge (Katherine Eggert), intuition in the sciences (Mary Thomas Crane), and occult ways of understanding (Mary Floyd-Wilson), scholars are turning to…

Lorna Hutson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2017) 832 pp. £95.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780199660889 Constructively posing some of the most challenging questions animating the study of law and literature, The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700 is a critical resource for any scholar of…

Hillary Eklund, ed, Ground-Work: English Renaissance Literature and Soil Science (PIttsburgh: Duquesne University Press 2017) 330 pp. $70.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-0-8207-0499-9 How often do we pay attention to the detritus below our feet? How frequently do we consider the materiality and deep metaphorical reservoirs of the earth upon which we walk? If these questions evoke…

Claire Preston, The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015) 320 pp. Hb, £60. ISBN: 9780198704805 The language of early modern scientific inquiry was neither predetermined nor did it elicit consensus among its practitioners regarding the most effective means for conveying information. Instead, as Claire Preston amply demonstrates, the rhetoric…

Elizabeth Yale, Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Nation in Early Modern Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2016) 384pp. Hb, PDF $69.95. ISBN: 978-0-8122-4781-7 Tracing the networks of correspondence, authorship, and print in early modern natural history, Elizabeth Yale describes the field’s project of delineating Britain topographically and thus as a political object. Sociable Knowledge…

Katherine Eggert, Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) 368 pp. Hb, EPUB, PDF $55.00. ISBN: 978-0-8122-4751-0 Katherine Eggert’s examination of early modern alchemy and epistemic practices begins with a seemingly irrational proposition; namely, it is “possible not to know what one knows” (2). As…

Jennifer Munro, Edward Geisweidt, and Lynne Bruckner, eds. Ecological Approaches to Early Modern English Texts: A Field Guide to Reading and Teaching (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). xx + 274pp. £58.50 Hb, £19.99 Pb, ePUB, PDF. ISBN 978-1-4724-1675-9 Ecological Approaches to Early Modern English Texts is an ambitious and useful reevaluation of contemporary ecocritical and environmentalist practices in literary studies. Indeed,…

Leah Knight, Reading Green in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). 166pp. £60 hb, ebook PDF, ebook ePUB. ISBN: 978-1-4724-0621-7. Leah Knight’s Reading Green in Early Modern England explores the varied meanings and practices associated with “green” in sixteenth and seventeenth century English texts. As Knight is careful to note, green or “going green” did not carry the same…