Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature
The Art of Making Knowledge, 1580–1670

Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature brings together key works in early modern science and imaginative literature.

Elizabeth Spiller (Author)

9780521037686, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 12 July 2007

232 pages, 8 b/w illus.
22.8 x 15.1 x 1.3 cm, 0.344 kg

'… she has opened the door to a complicated and complex area of study. Her linking of these radically different writers in seemingly disparate disciplines, her focus on sensory perception, and her discussion of the generation of knowledge are perceptive and illuminating … the book is well worth the read.' Dr John Holmes, Lecturer in English, University of Reading

Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature brings together key works in early modern science and imaginative literature (from the anatomy of William Harvey and the experimentalism of William Gilbert to the fictions of Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser and Margaret Cavendish). The book documents how what have become our two cultures of belief define themselves through a shared aesthetics that understands knowledge as an act of making. Within this framework, literary texts gain substance and intelligibility by being considered as instances of early modern knowledge production. At the same time, early modern science maintains strong affiliations with poetry because it understands art as a basis for producing knowledge. In identifying these interconnections between literature and science, this book contributes to scholarship in literary history, history of reading and the book, science studies and the history of academic disciplines.

List of figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: making early modern 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 Galileo's telescope: Johannes Kepler's dream for reading knowledge
4. Books written of the wonders of these glasses: Thomas Hobbes, Robert Hooke and Margaret Cavendish's theory of reading
Afterword: fiction and the Sokal hoax
Notes
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]