Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION; Howard Marchitello and Evelyn Tribble.- PART I: THEORIZING EARLY MODERN SCIENCE AND LITERATURE.- 1. The Grounds of Literature and Science: Margaret Cavendish’s Creature Manifesto; Liza Blake.- 2. Metaphor as a Strategy for Decoding Nature: Sir Thomas Browne and the ‘Hieroglyph’ Trope; Wendy Beth Hyman.- 3. Imaginary Voyages: The New Science and Its Search for a Vantage Point; Ofer Gal.- 4. Francis Bacon’s Literary-Scientific Utopia; Angus Fletcher.- PART II: READING MATTER.- 5. John Donne and the New Science; Mary Crane.- 6. God’s Game of Hide-and-Seek: Bacon and Allegory; Kristen Poole.- 7. Crafting Early Modern Readers: Galileo and His Interlocutors; Crystal Hall.- 8. Milton, the Poetics of Matter and the Science of Reading; Elizabeth Spiller.- 9. Reading Literally: Boyle, the Bible, and the Book of Nature; James Bono.- 10. Communicating Medical Recipes: Robert Boyle’s Genre and Rhetorical Strategiesfor Print; Michelle DiMeo.- PART III: PRE-DISCIPLINARY KNOWLEDGES.- 11. The Orphic Physics of Early Modern Eloquence; Jenny C. Mann.- 12. Hurricanes, Tempests, and the Meteorological Globe; Steve Mentz.- 13. Milton, Leibniz, and the Mathematics of Motion; Shankar Raman.- 14. No Joyful Voices: The Silence of the Urns in Browne’s Hydriotaphia and Contemporary Archaeology; Philip Schwyzer.- 15. Robert Boyle’s Accidents of an Ague and its Precursors; Claire Preston.- 16. Poetico-Mathematical Women and The Ladies’ Diary; Jacqueline Wernimont.- 17. Curiosity and the Occult: The Ambiguities of Science in Eighteenth-Century British Literature; Barbara Benedict.- PART IV: MODALITIES.- 18. Medical Discourses of Virginity and the Bed-Trick in Shakespearean Drama; Kaara L. Peterson.- 19. ‘Angry Mab with Blisters Plague’: The Pre-modern Science of Contagion in Romeo and Juliet; Mary Floyd-Wilson.- 20. Poetic Science: Wonder and the Seas of Cognition in Bacon and Pericles; Jean E. Feerick.- 21. A Mythography of Water: Hydraulic Engineering and the Imagination; Louise Noble.- 22. Hybrid Philosophers: Cavendish’s Reading of Hooke’s Micrographia; Ian Lawson.- 23. Making Worlds: Invention and Fiction in Bacon and Cavendish; Frédérique Aït-Touati.- AFTERWORD; Peter Dear.- TOPICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SELECTED FURTHER READING: EARLY MODERN LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND CULTURE; Christopher Morrow.- Index.-

About the Author

Howard Marchitello is Professor of English and Associate Dean for Research and the Graduate School at Rutgers University—Camden, USA. He is author of The Machine in the Text: Science and Literature in the Age of Shakespeare and Galileo (2011) and has published articles in Shakespeare Quarterly, ELH, ELR, and JMEMS. He served as Textual Editor of Henry V for the Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edition.
Evelyn Tribble is Professor of English and Donald Collie Chair at the University of Otago, New Zealand. She is the author of Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Palgrave, 2011) and Cognitive Ecologies and the History of Remembering in Early Modern England (Palgrave, 2011). Her book Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare’s Theatre will be published in late 2017.

Reviews

“Advanced researchers and students of the early modern period will find in this volume a wealth of insights on the productive tensions between literary and scientific discourses. … The volume offers a vital introduction to the most significant interventions into early modern literature and science, as well as important new trajectories forming in the wake of renewed conversations about the divisions within and across literature and science.” (Jen Boyle, Isis, Vol. 110 (2), June, 2019)
“An ambitious and timely resource, The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science is a wide-ranging, multivalent collection covering the intersections of literature and science. … should be on the bookshelf of any scholar interested in the shared histories of literature and science. But what is most significant about the collection is not simply the arguments offered about authors and texts, but rather the performance of the collection itself … .” (Katherine Walker, Journal of the Northern Renaissance, nothernrenaissance.org, August, 2017)