Category: Early Modern to Eighteenth Century

Stephanie Shirilan, Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy (London: Routledge 2015) 230 pp. £60.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781472417015 Stephanie Shirilan’s Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy argues that Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy seeks to transform the idea of melancholy from a disease to a beneficent spiritual state.  Instead of a cure what…

Paul Keen, Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012) 268 pp. £20.99 Pb, $25.00 PDF, £62.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781107016675 Paul Keen is Professor of English at Carleton University, with interests in the role of literature in society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The book under review…

Natalie M Phillips, Distraction: Problems of Attention in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2016) 304 pp. $50.00 EPUB, MOBI, PDF, $50.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781421420127 Natalie M. Phillips’s Distraction ventures with ease and lucidity into the fields of cognitive historicism and literary criticism, offering an intellectual history of distraction and novel perspectives into literary…

Tobias Menely, The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2015) 267 pp. $30.00 Pb. $90.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780226239392 In The Animal Claim, Tobias Menely does something unusual: he shows that eighteenth-century high poetry is a matter of imminent relevance beyond the rarefied field of eighteenth-century studies. This is impressive…

Ayesha Ramachandran, The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2015) 312 pp. $45.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780226288796 In The Worldmakers Ayesha Ramachandran takes readers into many worlds, both of her own making and those imagined by the eponymous ‘worldmakers’, a motley if erudite ensemble cast of mapmakers, anatomists, essayists, poets,…

Craig Martin, Subverting Aristotle: Religion, History and Philosophy in Early Modern Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2014) 272 pp. $54.95 Hb, EPUB, MOBI, PDF. ISBN: 9781421413167 Craig Martin sets out to provide an account of early modern anti-Aristotelianism as fundamentally informed by Christian piety. This thesis is important, and the book is full of…

Charis Charalampous, Rethinking the Mind-Body Relationship in Early Modern Literature, Philosophy and Medicine (Oxford: Routledge 2015) 168 pp. 8 B&W illus. £90.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781138823914 Charis Charalampous’s study is a contribution to the Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture series, and examines theoretical and creative approaches to the human body as an intelligence, with…

Judy A. Hayden, ed, Literature in the Age of Celestial Discovery: From Copernicus to Flamsteed (London and New York: Palgrave 2016) ix + 224 pp. £50.99 PDF, £63.99 Hb. ISBN 978-1-137-58345-1 This collection of nine essays examines literary responses to the astronomical theories debated throughout the Early Modern period.  In her introduction, Judy Hayden sets…

John Slater, Maríaluz López-Terrada and José Pardo-Tomás (eds), Medical Cultures of the Early Modern Spanish  (Farnham: Ashgate 2014) 326 pp. £70.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781472428134 The Spanish Empire had one of the longest colonial legacies, which spans from the fourteenth through the twentieth centuries.1 Medical Cultures of the Early Modern Spanish Empire is a multifaceted inquiry and a profound…