This slim volume on the brief correspondence between Margherita Sarrocchi and Galileo Galilei sets out to show its reader that in the early seventeenth century in Italy, the boundaries between literature and science that we have come to know in our discursive moment did not apply to the humanist community at the time. Ray's stated goal is to open ‘a window onto the fluid nature of networks of knowledge and the role of gender in early modern scientific and literary transactions' (p. 2). In this goal, Ray is quite successful. The volume she produces will indeed convince the reader that Sarrocchi's relationship with Galileo shows how tightly knit the worlds of astronomy, poetry, philology and astrology were in the period. Because of the volume's quite brief scope – the letters and the annotation take up only thirteen printed pages while the introductory chapters are quite a bit longer – the volume serves more as a starting point and source of inspiration for scholars interested in the history of science (and the history of gender and science) than as a fully developed intervention. However, given Ray's introduction and the publishing goals of Palgrave Pivot, an imprint designed to publish, among other things, briefer and more excitingly esoteric works, this is not meant as a criticism.

The first chapter sets the context of Galileo's and Sarrocchi's exchange within the scientific and literary culture of Renaissance Italy. The major takeaway from the chapter and from the book as a whole is the amount of overlap between the practice of poetry and the practice of astronomy in early seventeenth-century Italy. Sarrocchi's Scanderbeide, though not explicitly about scientific themes (unlike, perhaps, the Galliade of Guy le Fèvre de la Boderie), still, by nature of its being a heroic poem, must reflect the exceptional learning of its creator in matters scientific, historical and literary. There are echoes in this section, not explicitly brought up by Ray, of Strabo's praise of Homer at the beginning of his Geography. Epic and heroic poetry, in ancient Greece and in seventeenth-century Italy, requires a mind well versed in scientific matters.

Sarrocchi, as Ray explains, did indeed know her science and turned to Galileo for help in shaping and improving her poem. The outcome of this exchange, because of an implied break with Galileo, is never really seen in the finished poem and much of the remaining text is devoted to explaining the contents of the correspondence and Galileo's rise and fall. Sarrocchi, though answering a call to defend Galileo's work when asked (a letter included in the book), seems to break with Galileo just as he was facing house arrest and condemnation. The circumstances of this break, if indeed there was one, must be left to speculation. For all that Ray documents, so much of their relationship still seems lost to history.

There is so much that is interesting in this text that readers may find themselves frustrated by its brevity and its at times redundant and repetitive exposition. Sarrocchi's great poem, the one she turned to Galileo to improve, is treated only very briefly; this reader longed for more (and for more quotes from the poem itself). The letters, the raison d’être of the volume, take up only thirteen pages. Also, and this is not the author's fault, the print layout of the book makes it much harder to read than it should be. Awkward abstracts and keywords crowd the beginning of chapters and the endnotes, coming after each chapter, further draw attention to the brevity of the volume, especially the second chapter.

These quibbles, though, are in admiration and a longing for more. Ray's work is a gift to scholars of the relationship between poetry and science and, as she makes clear in her introduction, ‘this book … offers a beginning, not an end, to a rich new vein of scholarly thought in the fields of history of science, early modern literature, and gender studies' (p. 9). This book provides an excellent beginning and a source of inspiration for other scholars. For this and many more reasons, this book should be on the shelf of any scholar exploring the narrow and porous boundaries of Renaissance science and poetry.