The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England

Claire Preston is Professor of Renaissance Literature at Queen Mary University of London. Her books include Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early-Modern Science (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Bee (Reaktion, 2006), and Edith Wharton's Social Register (Macmillan/St Martin's, 2000). She is the recipient of Guggenheim and British Academy research awards and of the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize from the British Academy.

• Introduction 'A Distemper of Learning': The Languages of Science 1: Orlando Curioso: The Lapsarian Style of Thomas Browne 2: Equivocal Boyle and the Enamelled Telescope 3: 'A Blessing in the Wilderness': Fictions of Polity and the Place of Science 4: Dining Out in the Republic of Letters: The Rhetoric of Scientific Correspondence 5: The Counsel of Herbs: Scientific Georgic Bibliography Index

It is no wonder that Claire Preston's scrupulously well-researched The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England is such a pleasure to read ... Inspired by Enlightenment reason and Brownian fecundity alike, Preston's study does right by both the early modern era and our own.