Category: Early Modern to Eighteenth Century

Howard Marchitello, The Machine in the Text: Science and literature in the Age of Shakespeare and Galileo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 236 pp, £55 hb, ISBN 978-0-19-960805-8. The phrase ‘the two cultures’ has become a somewhat lazy shorthand for a supposed philosophical division between those who seek to understand the world largely through the…

Lisa T. Sarasohn, The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish: Reason and Fancy during the Scientific Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 251 pp. £39 hb. ISBN 0-8018-9443-3. Previously dismissed by historians of science, Margaret Cavendish’s philosophy has only recently begun to receive serious critical enquiry. Lisa Sarasohn’s book will encourage further study through its…

Adam Budd (ed.), John Armstrong’s ‘The Art of Preserving Health’: Eighteenth-Century Sensibility in Practice (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), xxii + 302 pp. £65.00 hb. ISBN: 978-0-7546-6306-5. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) Dr Adam Budd has provided a critical edition of John Armstrong’s 1,700-line four-book poem, The Art of Preserving Health (1744), complete…

David Houston Wood, Time, Narrative, and Emotion in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 199pp. £55.00hb.  ISBN 978-0-7546-6675-2. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) In Time, Narrative, and Emotion in Early Modern England, David Houston Wood explores the relationship between the explicit embodiment in the humoral self and the consideration of how…

Juliet Cummins and David Burchell (eds), Science, Literature and Rhetoric in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 256 pp. £60 hb. ISBN 0754657817. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) This volume brings together ten scholars from various fields in early modern studies to discuss the ways in which science, literature and rhetoric contributed…

Jo Wallwork and Paul Salzman (eds), Early Modern Englishwomen Testing Ideas (Burlington and Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2011), 158 pp. £50 hb. ISBN: 978 1 4094 1969 3. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) Jo Wallwork and Paul Salzman’s Early Modern Englishwomen Testing Ideas is a collection of essays about how women writers from…

James Dougal Fleming (ed), The Invention of Discovery, 1500-1700 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 228 pp. £55. ISBN 978-0-7546-6841-1. This collection aims to provoke a variety of eponymous discoveries and inventions about meanings held by the book’s keywords in the early modern world. In so doing it raises questions not only about the salience of these concepts…

Jennifer C. Vaught (ed.), Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), xv + 243 pp. £55. ISBN 9780754669487 (hbk); ISBN 9780754697121 (ebk). (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) Jennifer Vaught is to be congratulated on producing a fascinating, well-coordinated collection of essays by authors…

Katherine Hodgkin (ed.), Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England: The Autobiographical Writings of Dionys Fitzherbert (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). 290pp. £65.00hb.  ISBN 978-0-7546-3018-0. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) In Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England, Katherine Hodgkin explores the complex relationship between religion and madness and the early…