Category: Early Modern to Eighteenth Century

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…

Matthew Wickman, Literature After Euclid: The Geometric Imagination in the Long Scottish Enlightenment (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) viii + 293 pp. 7 Illustrations. £54.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780812247954 Is the eighteenth-century cultural heritage of Euclid in the Scottish Enlightenment a question for foxes of hedgehogs? For Matthew Wickman, Professor of English at Brigham Young University,…

Robert Lanier Reid, Renaissance Psychologies: Spenser and Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2017) xiii + 368 pp. £80 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-5261-0917-0 Renaissance Psychologies: Spenser and Shakespeare is a work of comparative literature on an ambitious and impressive scale. This publication is avowedly multidisciplinary, in line with the mission statement for the ‘Manchester Spenser series in…

Paula McDowell, The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017) 368 pp. 25 halftones. $45.00 Hb. ISBN:9780226456966 The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain is a wide-ranging and well-grounded investigation into the impact of print on eighteenth-century understandings of orality. McDowell…

Clare Brant, Balloon Madness: Flights of Imagination in Britain, 1783-1786 (Mantlesham: Boydell and Brewer 2017) 366 pp. £25.00 HB. ISBN: 9781783272532 Clare Brant’s Balloon Madness covers the years 1783-1786, when Britain became fascinated with aeronautical balloons. The ‘balloon madness’ spread through all levels of society and, seemingly, almost every sphere of British culture. Brant’s book…

Alison Bashford and Joyce E. Chaplin, The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Rereading the Principle of Population (London: Princeton University Press, 2016) 368 pp. £35.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780823272990 The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus offers a timely reappraisal of Malthus’s writing on population within the context of eighteenth and early nineteenth century colonial…

Jonathan Lamb, Scurvy: The Disease of Discovery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016) 328 pp. £35.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780691182933 Scurvy impacted profoundly the history of Europe’s expansion by sea and, consequently, influenced heavily its society, culture and artistic production. The scientific and medical history of scurvy was discussed by Kenneth J. Carpenter in The History of…

Tom Furniss, Discovering the Footsteps of Time: Geological Travel Writing about Scotland, 1700-1820 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2018) xiv + 305 pp. £80 Hb. ISBN: 9781474410014 Early on in his rigorous monograph, Furniss quotes from Martin Martin’s A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland (1703). The savant from Skye, known also as Màrtainn Màrtainn…

Colin Jones, The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2014) 256 pp. £14.99 Pb, £22.99 Hb. ISBN: 9780198715818 In a particularly memorable anecdote in his The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris, Colin Jones follows in the footsteps of scholars who have treated Louis XIV’s absolutism as an early form of ‘star…

Simon Smith, Jacqueline Watson and Amy Kenny (eds), The Senses in Early Modern England 1558-1660 (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2015) 256 pp. £75.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-0-7190-9158-2 The theoretical background of the representation of sense perception in art and literature has seen an expansion in recent years as the result of the cognitive turn, and of…