The first offering in a projected five-volume series, The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science is targeted at a generation of scholars who view “the literary and the scientific … as productively in-distinct cultural undertakings and operations” (xxvi). Such an audience will no doubt find it to be rewarding and suggestive reading. While more of an open-ended essay collection than a handbook—as the editors note, the organizational structure is somewhat arbitrary and the materials included “equally vast and eclectic” (xxxiv)—the volume's heterogeneity is indeed one of its greatest strengths. While individual chapters provide novel contextualized readings of specific authors and subjects, the dialogue between chapters is equally illuminating and creates a lively conversation along the lines of what Liza Blake, in a stimulating chapter on Cavendish's epistemology, theorizes as “composite” knowledge in which individual, specialized parts “forge associations” to form a dynamic, interdisciplinary body (16).

Blake's essay is the first of four in an opening section theorizing the relationship between literature and science, each of which invites us to think in a particular set of early modern terms as a means of moving past current conceptual impasses between the disciplines. Wendy Beth Hyman's chapter on Boyle and Browne aims to “troubl[e] the modern idea that literality, not figurality, is the mode of truth,” by demonstrating that for many natural philosophers metaphor acted as a “forensic device” through which they could approach God's created universe (27). Ofer Gal counters conventional twentieth-century accounts of the role of the imagination in the history of science, arguing that, for seventeenth-century natural philosophers and astronomers, the imagination was not a tool of bold speculation but, rather, a means of domesticating the new information provided by instruments such as the telescope. Angus Fletcher, meanwhile, finds in Bacon's New Atlantis a potential solution to the threat to social unity posed by modern science's displacement of religion—a displacement that he feels the work simultaneously enacts—by focusing on the forms and practices of literature itself as a means of creating community.

Many of these theoretical concerns are picked up in subsequent chapters. Mary Thomas Crane's exploration of the influence of the popular Elizabethan trope of voyage to unknown places on subsequent writers, including Donne, comes together in interesting ways with Gal's argument, as does Frédérique Aït-Touati's astute analysis of Cavendish's Blazing World as inverting Bacon's metaphorical equation between geographic and scientific discovery in order to privilege her own imaginative creation of new worlds over the mere discovery of existing ones. Hyman's discussion of metaphor, meanwhile, chimes nicely with James Bono's analysis of Boyle's epistemological approach as a grammatical “parsing” of God's material translations of his word, as well as with Kirsten Poole's excellent piece on Bacon's use of allegory, which leverages recent work on Protestant hermeneutics to argue that language reformers such as Bacon conceived a “textual structure” in which the literal absorbed rather than replaced the allegorical (115). Jacqueline Wernimont's fascinating study of the role and readership of the poetic and mathematical enigmas included in The Ladies’ Diary picks up on Fletcher's discussion of literary practices and offers a compelling argument for the need to consider “pleasurable” activities such as poetry and puzzle as central to civic engagement in science.

Other chapters produce new readings of familiar texts by locating them within disciplinary contexts from which they have been anachronistically excised. Reading Shakespeare alongside contemporary medical tracts, Kaara Peterson offers an enlightening reappraisal of the Shakespearean “bed-trick” as a cure for diseases associated with virginity, while Mary Floyd-Wilson makes a compelling case for Romeo and Juliet as deeply influenced by plague literature. Shankar Raman places Milton's Paradise Lost in dialogue with Leibniz's writings in order to “uncover the mathematical as a terrain shared by their respective theodicies” (279), while Steve Mentz traces the influence of sailors’ firsthand accounts of hurricanes on writers such as Shakespeare and Defoe in order to show how empirical knowledge entered the English imagination in a period of nascent globalization.

Taken as a whole, The Palgrave Handbook is a vibrant contribution to an expanding field of early modern scholarship and will be of considerable interest to literary scholars, historians of science, and early modern cultural historians more broadly.