Category: Early Modern to Eighteenth Century
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King, Christa Knellwolf, Faustus and the Promises of the New Science
Christa Knellwolf King, Faustus and the Promises of New Science, c. 1580-1730: From the Chapbooks to Harlequin Faustus (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). 216 pp. £55 hb. ISBN 0754661334. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) It is one of the most widely acknowledged truths in the Faustus criticism that the dangers of unrestrained curiosity…
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Das, Nandini (ed), Robert Greene’s Planetomachia
Nandini Das, ed. Robert Greene’s Planetomachia (1585) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). lv +168pp. £55.00 hb. ISBN 0-7546-5661-6. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) A fitting contribution to Ashgate’s new “Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity” series, Nandini Das’s edition of Robert Greene’s Planetomachia (1585) affords access to a significant cultural artifact from…
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Spiller, Elizabeth, Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature
Elizabeth Spiller, Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature. The Art of Making Knowledge, 1580-1670 (2004. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2007). 232 pp. ₤56.00 hb/₤24.99 pb. ISBN 978-0-521-83086-7 (hb)/978-0-521-03768-6(pb). In Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature, Elizabeth Spiller addresses the manner in which literature and science arose out of the same philosophical tradition and asserts that the interest of…
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George, Samantha, Botany, Sexuality and Women’s Writing
Samantha George, Botany, Sexuality and Women’s Writing, 1760-1830: From Modest Shoot to Forward Plant (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). 288 pp. £55 hb. ISBN 978-0719076978. Sam George’s Botany, Sexuality and Women’s Writing 1760-1830 picks up where the work of science and gender pioneers like Barbara T. Gates, Anne Shteir and Londa Schiebinger left off; but rather…
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Burney, Ian, Poison, Detection and the Victorian Imagination
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Laurie Garrison
Ian Burney, Poison, Detection and the Victorian Imagination (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). 224pp. £35 hb. ISBN 0719073766. The middle decades of the nineteenth century are well-known to be a period where popular culture was fascinated with deviant behaviours. These were the decades that saw the height of popularity of sensation novels and sensation drama, genres rife with…
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Turner, Henry S., The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580-1630
Henry S. Turner, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580-1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 342 pp. £67 hb. ISBN 978-0199287383. This is a highly readable and substantial contribution to our understanding of early modern English drama. Turner’s project is a convincing challenge to anachronistic views of the separation of the arts and…
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Stiles, Anne (ed), Neurology and Literature, 1860-1920
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Deric Corlew
Anne Stiles (ed.), Neurology and Literature, 1860-1920 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 240 pp. £48 hb. ISBN 978-0230520943. In the late nineteenth century, the term “neurology” referred not only to the medical study of the nervous system, but also encompassed a broad range of fields from neuroscience to clinical psychology. This collection of eight essays is thus…
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Turner, Henry S., Shakespeare’s Double Helix
Henry S. Turner, Shakespeare’s Double Helix (London: Continuum, 2007). 129 pp. £ 45 hb/£12.99 pb. ISBN 978-0826491190 (hb)/978-0826491206 (pb). Coming from a talented scholar in Shakespearean studies, author of an in-depth study on the role of mathematics and craftsmanship in the construction of the Renaissance theatrical practice (The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical…
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Sawday, Jonathan, Engines of the Imagination
Jonathan Sawday, Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007). 424 pp. £65 hb; £18.99 pb. ISBN 978-0415350624. Engines of the Imagination is an acute re-assessment of the status of technology in Renaissance Europe, tracing the permeation of the world of the machine into poetic, political and philosophical…
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Higgitt, Rebekah, Recreating Newton
Rebekah Higgitt, Recreating Newton: Newtonian Biography and the Making of Nineteenth-Century History of Science (Pickering & Chatto 2007) 286pp. £60 Hb. ISBN 978-1851969067 Until relatively recently historians of science have been sceptical about biography as a mode through which to understand scientific practice, and sceptical about what has been seen as the inevitable partiality of…
