This book is about the complex ways in which science and literature are mutually-informing and mutually-sustaining. Topic coverage ranges 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.

Table of Contents

• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Contributors
• Part I Theorizing Early Modern Science and Literature
• The Grounds of Literature and Science: Margaret Cavendish's Creature Manifesto Liza Blake
• ‘Deductions from Metaphors’: Figurative Truth, Poetical Language, and Early Modern Science Wendy Beth Hyman
• Imaginary Voyages: The New Science and Its Search for a Vantage Point (Or: How the Imagination Was Used to Domesticate the Exotic) Ofer Gal
• Francis Bacon's Literary-Scientific Utopia Angus Fletcher
• Part II Reading Matter
• John Donne and the New Science Mary Thomas Crane
• God's Game of Hide-and-Seek: Bacon and Allegory Kristen Poole
• Crafting Early Modern Readers: Galileo and His Interlocutors Crystal Hall
• Milton, the Poetics of Matter, and the Sciences of Reading Elizabeth Spiller
• Reading Literally: Boyle, the Bible, and the Book of Nature James J. Bono
• Communicating Medical Recipes: Robert Boyle's Genre and Rhetorical Strategies for Print Michelle DiMeo
• Part III Pre-disciplinary Knowledges
• The Orphic Physics of Early Modern Eloquence Jenny C. Mann
• Hurricanes, Tempests, and the Meteorological Globe Steve Mentz
• Milton, Leibniz, and the Measure of Motion Shankar Raman
• No Joyful Voices: The Silence of the Urns in Browne's Hydriotaphia and Contemporary Archaeology Philip Schwyzer
• Robert Boyle's ‘Accidents of an Ague’ and Its Precursors Claire Preston
• Poetico-Mathematical Women and The Ladies’ Diary Jacqueline D. Wernimont
• Curiosity and the Occult: The Ambiguities of Science in Eighteenth-Century British Literature Barbara M. Benedict
• Part IV Modalities
• Medical Discourses of Virginity and the Bed-Trick in Shakespearean Drama Kaara L. Peterson
• ‘Angry Mab with Blisters Plague’: The Pre-Modern Science of Contagion in Romeo and Juliet Mary Floyd-Wilson
• Poetic Science: Wonder and the Seas of Cognition in Bacon and Pericles Jean E. Feerick
• A Mythography of Water: Hydraulic Engineering and the Imagination Louise Noble
• Hybrid Philosophers: Cavendish's Reading of Hooke's Micrographia Ian Lawson
• Making Worlds: Invention and Fiction in Bacon and Cavendish Frédérique Aït-Touati
• Afterword Peter Dear
• Selected Topical Bibliography and Suggested Further Readings Christopher L. Morrow