Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity: Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity
About the Book Series
For more than a decade now, Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity has provided a forum for groundbreaking work on the relations between literary and scientific discourses in Europe, during a period when both fields were in a crucial moment of historical formation. We welcome proposals that address the many overlaps between modes of imaginative writing typical of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries”poetics, rhetoric, prose narrative, dramatic production, utopia”and the vocabularies, conceptual models, and intellectual methods of newly emergent 'scientific' fields such as medicine, astronomy, astrology, alchemy, psychology, mapping, mathematics, or natural history. In order to reflect the nature of intellectual inquiry during the period, the series is interdisciplinary in orientation and publishes monographs, edited collections, and selected critical editions of primary texts relevant to an understanding of the mutual implication of literary and scientific epistemologies.
John Norden's The Surveyor's Dialogue (1618): A Critical Edition
1st Edition
Edited
By Mark Netzloff
October 14, 2024
This edition provides the first complete, modern version of John Norden's The Surveyor's Dialogue. Norden's text, a series of dialogues between a fictional surveyor and several interlocutors”including a tenant farmer, an aristocrat landowner, a manorial officer, and a socially mobile land buyer”is ...
Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy
1st Edition
By Stephanie Shirilan
December 12, 2019
Few English books are as widely known, underread, and underappreciated as Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. Stephanie Shirilan laments that modern scholars often treat the Anatomy as an unmediated repository of early modern views on melancholy, overlooking the fact that Burton is writing a...
Francis Bacon and the Refiguring of Early Modern Thought: Essays to Commemorate The Advancement of Learning (1605–2005)
1st Edition
By Catherine Gimelli Martin, Julie Robin Solomon
June 12, 2019
Commemorating the 400th anniversary of the publication of Francis Bacon's Advancement of Learning (1605), this collection examines Bacon's recasting of proto-scientific philosophies and practices into early modern discourses of knowledge. Like Bacon, all of the contributors to this volume confront ...
Science, Literature and Rhetoric in Early Modern England
1st Edition
By David Burchell, Juliet Cummins
November 15, 2016
These essays throw new light on the complex relations between science, literature and rhetoric as avenues to discovery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds examine the agency of early modern poets, playwrights, essayists, philosophers, ...
The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature
1st Edition
Edited
By Wendy Beth Hyman
November 15, 2016
The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature features original essays exploring the automaton-from animated statue to anthropomorphized machine-in the poetry, prose, and drama of England in the 16th and 17th centuries. Addressing the history and significance of the living machine in early ...
Milton's Secrecy: And Philosophical Hermeneutics
1st Edition
By James Dougal Fleming
November 10, 2016
Scientific modernity treats interpretation as a matter of discovery. Discovery, however, may not be all that matters about interpretation. In Milton's Secrecy, J. D. Fleming argues that the poetry and prose of John Milton (1608-1674) are about the presentation of a radically different hermeneutic ...
Staging Anatomies: Dissection and Spectacle in Early Stuart Tragedy
1st Edition
By Hillary M. Nunn
November 10, 2016
Hillary M. Nunn here traces the connections between the London public's interest in medical dissection and the changing cultural significance of bloodshed on the early Stuart playhouse stage. Considering the playhouses' role within the social world of early modern London, Nunn explores the ...
Anamorphosis in Early Modern Literature: Mediation and Affect
1st Edition
By Jen E. Boyle
October 31, 2016
Anamorphosis in Early Modern Literature explores the prevalence of anamorphic perspective in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England. Jen Boyle investigates how anamorphic media flourished in early modern England as an interactive technology and mode of affect in public interactive ...
Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England: Sixteenth-Century Plants and Print Culture
1st Edition
By Leah Knight
October 26, 2016
Contemplating the textual gardens, poetic garlands, and epigrammatic groves which dot the landscape of early modern English print, Leah Knight exposes and analyzes the close configuration of plants and writing in the period. She argues that the early modern cultures and cultivation of plants and ...
Biblical Scholarship, Science and Politics in Early Modern England: Thomas Browne and the Thorny Place of Knowledge
1st Edition
By Kevin Killeen
October 19, 2016
Kevin Killeen addresses one of the most enigmatic of seventeenth century writers, Thomas Browne (1605-1682), whose voracious intellectual pursuits provide an unparalleled insight into how early modern scholarly culture understood the relations between its disciplines. Browne's work encompasses ...
Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell
1st Edition
By Diane Kelsey McColley
October 14, 2016
The focus of this study is the perception of nature in the language of poetry and the languages of natural philosophy, technology, theology, and global exploration, primarily in seventeenth-century England. Its premise is that language and the perception of nature vitally affect each other and that...
Medical Authority and Englishwomen's Herbal Texts, 1550–1650
1st Edition
By Rebecca Laroche
September 08, 2016
The first study to analyze print vernacular folio herbals from the standpoint of gender and to present original findings to do with early modern women's ownership of these herbals, Medical Authority and Englishwomen's Herbal Texts also looks at reasons and contexts behind early modern female ...