Category: Early Modern to Eighteenth Century

Eileen Reeves, Galileo’s Glassworks: The Telescope and the Mirror (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2008). 240 pp. $23.00 Hb. ISBN 978-0-6740-2667-4 In Galileo’s Glassworks, Eileen Reeves deftly reassesses the lapse between the invention of the telescope in Middleburg, September 1608 and the publication of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger) in Venice, March 1610. Mapping out the…

Martin Priestman, The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin: Enlightened Spaces, Romantic Times(Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). xiv + 310 pp. £70 Hb. ISBN 978-1-4724-1954-5. Erasmus Darwin was a successful doctor, inventor, scientist and poet, a vast man with an even vaster range of interests and capabilities once described by Coleridge as ‘the first literary character in Europe’ (quoted…

Leah Knight, Reading Green in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). 166pp. £60 hb, ebook PDF, ebook ePUB. ISBN: 978-1-4724-0621-7. Leah Knight’s Reading Green in Early Modern England explores the varied meanings and practices associated with “green” in sixteenth and seventeenth century English texts. As Knight is careful to note, green or “going green” did not carry the same…

Stephen Pender and Nancy S. Struever (eds.), Rhetoric and Medicine in Early Modern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). 310 pp. £74 hb. ISBN 9781409430223. The cover of Rhetoric and Medicine in Early Modern Europe, which features the Greco-Roman figure Lady Rhetoric holding a caduceus, hints at the tandem relationship between rhetoric and medicine during the Renaissance…

Dirk van Miert (ed.), Communicating Observations in Early Modern Letters (1500-1675): Epistolography and Epistemology in the Age of the Scientific Revolution, Warburg Institute Colloquia 23 (London and Turin: The Warburg Institute and Nino Aragno Editore, 2013), 289 pp. £50 pb. ISBN 9781908590466.   This volume—based on a colloquium held at the Warburg Institute, London, in…

Cristina Malcolmson, Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Society: Boyle, Cavendish, Swift (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), xii + 233pp. £54.00. ISBN: 978-0-7546-3778-3. BSLS members are entitled to a 20% discount on Ashgate titles. Click here for details. This absorbing monograph seeks to re-locate the origins of scientific racism to the late seventeenth century, showing…

Jean Feerick and Vin Nardizzi (eds), The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 304pp. £52.00 Hb. ISBN 9780230340473 What is an indistinct human—or indistinct about the human? When did such odd questions become askable? The mere title of this collection of thirteen compact essays introduced by two careful editors provokes such inquiries, and…

Avner Ben-Zaken, Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560-1660 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). xii+246pp. £31 Hb. ISBN 9780801894763 In The White Castle Orhan Pamuk uses the capture of a Christian ship by a Turkish galley to ruminate on that seemingly perennial theme, east-west relations. A novelistic sleight of hand symbolically dissolves identity and…

Frédérique Aït-Touati, Fictions of the Cosmos: Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century, trans. Susan Emanuel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 261 pp. HB £31.50. ISBN 978-0-226-01122-4. Fictions of the Cosmos explores the intricate relationship between scientific and literary discourses in seventeenth-century Europe. The interpenetration of early modern scientific and literary language and genres…