Books in the Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity series

Provides information on the complex relations between science, literature and rhetoric as avenues to discovery in the 17th and 18th centuries. This book examines the agency of early modern poets, playwrights, essayists, philosophers, natural philosophers and artists in remaking their culture and reforming ideas about human understanding.

Analyzes print vernacular folio herbals from the standpoint of gender, and presents original findings to do with early modern women's ownership of these herbals. This title establishes cultural backdrops in the gendering of medical authority that takes place in the herbals and the regular ownership of these herbals by women.

Offers information on fertility, pregnancy, birth, and infant care. This work shows how early-modern ideas about the reproductive process combined ancient, medieval, and contemporary ideas. It is useful to scholars and students in a range of academic disciplines, including literature, history, and women's.

Features 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 modern literature, the title places literary automata of the period within their larger aesthetic.

Examines Bacon's recasting of proto-scientific philosophies and practices into early modern discourses of knowledge. The volume's main theme is Bacon's core interest in identifying and conceptualizing coherent intellectual disciplines, including the central question of whether Bacon succeeded in creating unified discourses about learning.

This edition provides the first complete, modern version of John Norden's The Surveyor's Dialogue, a text remarkable for its unique commentary on the agrarian roots of English capitalism. In his extensive introduction, Mark Netzloff discusses the literary production of early modern surveyors and examines the impact of capital formation on agrarian and manorial class relations as well as on the natural environment of early modern England.

Focuses on the perception of nature in the language of poetry and the languages of natural philosophy, technology, theology, and global exploration, primarily in 17th-century England. This book provides close readings of works by various poets in the contexts of natural history, philosophy, and theology as well as technology and land use.

Debates that the poetry and prose of John Milton are about the presentation of a radically different hermeneutic model. Drawing on Renaissance Neoplatonism, Tudor-Stuart ideology, and Calvinist theory of conscience, this work argues that the attempt to theorize interpretation without discovery is not unorthodox within early modern English culture.

Offers introductory material (on biographical, literary and scientific contexts) and annotation identifying Greene's allusions and elucidating his vocabulary. This book includes translations and extracts, along with a bibliography of relevant primary texts and critical work on Greene generally and on "Planetomachia" in particular.

Investigates how anamorphic media flourished in early modern England as an interactive technology and mode of affect in public interactive art, city and garden design, and as a theory and figure in literature, political theory and natural and experimental philosophy.

Examining both poetic and botanical texts, as well as the poetics of botanical texts, this study focuses on the two English botanical writers of the sixteenth century, William Turner and John Gerard, to suggest the unexpected historical relationship between literature and science in the early modern genre of the herbal.

Addresses one of the 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.

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 modern literature, the collection places literary automata of the period within their larger aesthetic, historical, philosophical, and scientific contexts. While no single theory or perspective conscribes the volume, taken as a whole the collection helps correct an assumption that frequently emerges from a post-Enlightenment perspective: that these animated beings are by definition exemplars of the new science, or that they point necessarily to man''s triumphant relationship to technology. On the contrary, automata in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seem only partly and sporadically to function as embodiments of an emerging mechanistic or materialist worldview. Renaissance automata were just as likely not to confirm for viewers a hypothesis about the man-machine. Instead, these essays show, automata were often a source of wonder, suggestive of magic, proof of the uncannily animating effect of poetry-indeed, just as likely to unsettle the divide between man and divinity as that between man and matter.