Category: Early Modern to Eighteenth Century

J D Fleming, The Mirror of Information in Early Modern England: John Wilkins and the Universal Character (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2017) xi + 292 pp. £74.50 Hb. ISBN 978-3-319-40300-7 Known in the United States as ‘Telephone’, in the UK as ‘Chinese Whispers’, and in France as ‘Téléphone Arabe’ the children’s game of passing from one…

Julie Peakman, Amatory Pleasures: Explorations in Eighteenth-Century Sexual Culture (London: Bloomsbury 2016) 240 pp. £21.99 Pb. ISBN: 9781474226448 Amatory Pleasures is a collection of articles written by Julie Peakman, which seeks to investigate how sex and the sexualised body were constructed in the eighteenth-century imagination. Using samples of the written word (as well as illustration…

Alanna Skuse, Constructions of Cancer in Early Modern England: Ravenous Natures (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2015) viii + 219 pp. £15.00 Pb, £20.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-137-48752-0 Open access https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2F9781137487537.pdf  Alanna Skuse’s Constructions of Cancer is a cultural history of a disease that we tend to think as modern, but which has a long and rich past.  Skuse…

Lucinda Cole, Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature and the Sciences of Life, 1600-1740 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2016) 240 pp. Open access here, $39.00 Pb, $75.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-0-472-05295-0 The true merit of Lucinda Cole’s study lies in its ability to unravel some of the quite subtle constituents of how ‘the human’ is defined.…

Allan Ingram and Leigh Wetherall Dickson, eds, Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture: Fashioning the Unfashionable (London: Palgrave 2016) 290pp. £66.99 Hb. ISBN: 9781137597182 Based on the findings of their Leverhulme Trust-funded ‘Fashionable Diseases’ research project, the editors of and contributors to Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture explore the fascinating…

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…

Luke Morgan, The Monster in the Garden: The Grotesque and the Gigantic in Renaissance Landscape Design (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2016) 256 pp. $ 65.00 Hb. . ISBN: 9780812247558 In The Monster in the Garden Luke Morgan postulates that the historical place-spaces represented by Renaissance landscapes should be understood as in Foucauldian terms as…

Avihu Zakai, Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of Nature: the Re-enchantment of the World in the Age of Scientific Reasoning (London: T & T Clark 2010) 352pp. $136.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780567226501 Avihu Zakai’s Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of Nature provides a survey of early modern Christian reactions to the natural philosophy or science, and examines Edwards’s theological alternative…

Kevin Binfield, ed, Writings of the Luddites (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2015) xxviii + 279pp. $29.95 Pb, $55.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780801876127 The 2015 paperback edition of this 2004 collection testifies to the fascinations of Luddism – and to Writings of the Luddites’s continuing appeal and utility.  It is the first collection of texts written…

Peter de Bolla, The Architecture of Concepts: The Historical Formation of Human Rights (New York: Fordham University Press 2013) x+298 pp. $40.00 Pb, $130.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-0-8232-5439-2 Peter de Bolla’s ambitious The Architecture of Concepts essentially offers three books in one. As its subtitle suggests, it aims to contribute to an understanding of the historical origins…