Category: Early Modern to Eighteenth Century

Al Coppola, The Theater of Experiment: Staging Natural Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2016), x + 265 pp. £56.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780190269715 ‘All the philosophies that men have learned or devised are, in our opinion, so many plays produced and performed which have created false and fictitious worlds’. This quotation from Lord Bacon’s…

Alison A Chapman, The Legal Epic: Paradise Lost and the Early Modern Law (Chicago: Chicago University Press 2017) 248 pp. $40 Hb. ISBN: 9780226435138 Among the plethora of connections Alison A Chapman makes between the jurisprudential and theological realms in her thoroughly contextualized The Legal Epic: Paradise Lost and The Early Modern Law, is a…

Molly Farrell, Counting Bodies: Population in Colonial American Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2016) 296 pp. £48.99 Hb. ISBN: 9780190277314 Until the end of the seventeenth century, the word ‘population’ was defined in dictionaries as the loss of people. As Molly Farrell outlines in the introduction to Counting Bodies: Population in Colonial American , the…

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…

Jon Whitman (ed.), Romance and History: Imagining Time from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015) 338 pp. $82.00 PDF, £22.99 Pb, £67.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781107042780 In Romance and History: Imagining Time from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period, Jon Whitman brings together experts from different countries to discuss…

Jessica Winston, Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558-1581 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2016) 286 pp. £60 Hb. ISBN: 9780198769422 Jessica Winston is both Professor of English and Chair of Department of History at the University of Idaho. This book provides an interdisciplinary link between these two areas…

David Thorley, Writing Illness and Identity in Seventeenth-Century Britain (London: Palgrave 2016) x + 231 pp. £45.99 PDF, EPUB, £58.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-137-59311-5 The title of this book immediately recalled to mind a favourite course on Early Modern autobiography from the halcyon first years of graduate school. But a quick glace at its meticulously researched,…

Paul Budra and Clifford Werier (eds), Shakespeare and Consciousness (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2016) xiv +307 pp. £45.99 PDF, EPUB, £58.00 Hb. ISBN 978-1-137-59671-0 Shakespeare and Consciousness, as the title suggests, explores issues pertaining to the works of William Shakespeare – his dramatic works, in this case – and consciousness, conceived in this study primarily through scientific…

Maureen Tuthill, Health and Sickness in the Early American Novel: Social Affection and Eighteenth-Century Medicine (London: Palgrave Macmillian 2016) 253pp. £45.99 PDF, EPUB, £58.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-137-59714-4 What makes a person healthy or sick? What makes a person worthy of healing? Does the responsibility for healing lie with the individual or with the community to…