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This book is about the complex ways in which science and literature are mutually-informing and mutually-sustaining. It does not cast the literary and the scientific as distinct, but rather as productively in-distinct cultural practices: for the two dozen new essays collected here, the presiding concern is no longer to ask how literary writers react to scientific writers, but rather to study how literary and scientific practices are imbricated. These specially-commissioned essays range across vast territories and produce seemingly unlikely unions: between physics and rhetoric, math and Milton, Boyle and the Bible, plague and plays, among many others. In these essays so-called scientific writing turns out to traffic in metaphor, wit, imagination, and playfulness normally associated with literature provides material forms and rhetorical strategies for thinking physics, mathematics, archeology, and medicine 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 Strategies for 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.-
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