Synopses & Reviews
Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature brings together key works in early modern science and imaginative literature.
Review
"Spiller offers some fascinating insights into how both imaginative and scientific writers in this great age of discovery used texts to create new knowledge through the process of reading. [...] Spiller's perceptive parallel readings of texts usually kept separate is a valuable addition to the scholarship on the early modern period, as well as to the study of science and literature." Times Literary Supplement"A similarly original, learned, and compelling book... Fascinating chapters brilliantly pair Sidney's Defence of Poesy and William Gilbert's On the Magnet, the accounts of creation/generation in Spenser's Faerie Queene with William Harvey's Disputations, Galileo's Starry Messenger and Johann Kepler's response in Dream, and finally Robert Hooke's Microcosmographia with Margaret Cavendish's writings, which present a vitalist theory of reading to oppose the mechanism of Hobbes and Hooke. Spiller's superb discussion of Cavendish places her appropriately in very serious company. Studies in English Literature
Review
"Spiller offers some fascinating insights into how both imaginative and scientific writers in this great age of discovery used texts to create new knowledge through the process of reading. [...] Spiller's perceptive parallel readings of texts usually kept separate is a valuable addition to the scholarship on the early modern period, as well as to the study of science and literature." Times Literary Supplement
Table of Contents
Introduction. Early modern arts of knowledge: making science and literature; 1. Model worlds: Philip Sidney, William Gilbert, and the experiment of worldmaking; 2. From embryology to parthenogenesis: the birth of the writer in Edmund Spenser and William Harvey; 3. Reading through Galileoâs telescope: Johannes Keplerâs dream for reading knowledge; 4. Books written of the wonders of these glasses: Thomas Hobbes, Robert Hooke, and Margaret Cavendishâs theory of reading; Afterword: fiction and the Sokal Hoax; Notes; Bibliography; Index.