Books in the Alembics: Penn Studies in Literature and Science series

The Wreckage of Intentions offers a comprehensive account of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century projects-concrete yet incomplete efforts to advance British society during a period defined by revolutions in finance and agriculture, the rise of experimental science, and the establishment of constitutional monarchy.

In the period just prior to medicine's modernity, England saw a remarkable upsurge in medical writing. Julie Orlemanski's Symptomatic Subjects shows how late medieval English writers drew on the discourse of medicine to narrate anew the crossings-and the conflicts-between physiology and personhood.

In Extinction and the Human Timothy Sweet ponders the realities of animal extinction and endangerment and the often divergent Native American and Euro-American narratives that surround them, focusing especially on the force of human impact on megafauna-mammoths, whales, and the North American bison.