Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature: The Art of Making Knowledge, 1580–1670 (review)

This ambitious book aims to demonstrate that in its early modern origins "science" self-consciously engages in making (rather than discovering) knowledge precisely as early modern "literature" does: through the creation of artificial constructs. Thus, historically, the scientific did not define itself against the fictional as, Elizabeth Spiller contends, it does today. Each of her four chapters juxtaposes a work of natural philosophy (Gilbert's On the Magnet, Harvey's Disputations,Galileo's Starry Messenger, and Hooke's Micrographia) with a work of imaginative literature (Sidney's Defence of Poesy, Spenser's Faerie Queene, Kepler's Dream, and Cavendish's Blazing World) to show that "a belief in the made rather than the found character of early modern knowledge unites poets and natural scientists" (2). The Sokal hoax, discussed in an afterword, provides evidence for Spiller that scientists continue to claim "reality" for their work while denying it to poets. The concern of early modern writers (both natural philosophers and poets) with the way that knowledge is produced explains the inclusion of reading in the book's title.

Spiller's is an interesting, potentially valuable, thesis; locally astute if somewhat overstated observations about Gilbert's terrellas and Hooke's assumptions about beauty and monstrosity, for instance, point to the benefits of allowing a wider cultural context to inform the reading of Renaissance works of natural philosophy. There is further work to be done, however, before Spiller's thesis renders the illuminating insights that it promises. Some of that work is as basic as the placing of terms in their historical context. Literature does not take on its modern meaning until the eighteenth century, and some reflection is needed before it can safely be used to designate a primary category of thought between 1580 and 1670. Science and natural philosophy are not equivalent, and to use them as if they were elides the process by which natural philosophy becomes science. Experience and experiment, on the other hand, are equivalent in the decades covered by the book. Their gradual differentiation over the course of the seventeenth century is messy and frustratingly complex, but to simplify by applying experiment in its modern sense to practices conducted in 1600 is anachronistic. To say that "Gilbert anticipates a post-Newtonian split between personal experience andscientific experiment and clearly chooses the side of experiment" (54) is to betray a worrying lack of historical consciousness. The period covered, after all,is nearly a century. Perhaps too great a reliance on the phrase "early modern"is responsible for a lack of crispness in distinguishing late sixteenth- frommid-seventeenth-century attitudes toward experiencing the natural world.

Spiller's central concern with the reader's role in creating meaning — her account of Margaret Cavendish as a reader of Hooke and Hobbes, for instance, is particularly interesting — justifies some comment on two pervasive stylistic features of Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature. First, typographical (and even, one fears, spelling) errors abound. Second, clauses constructed with how are ubiquitous, and these, because they are too often gestural, weaken the analytical force of the writing. Both features (as well as the muddling of natural philosophy and sciences) occur in a discussion of Sidney's apparent digressions: "what is relevant is not so much how Sidney understands natural philosophy, astronomy, and other sciences, but rather how he claims that poetry is a [sic] act of making that becomes a way of knowing" (39). The two hows do not make a true parallel; if the first were changed to that, it would be clear that Spiller needs to explain what in fact Sidney understands natural philosophy to be or do. One could cite a number of other instances in which a lack of precision erodes confidence in the author's ability to support her thesis. These range from the relatively minor (e.g., the...