Travel Narratives, the New Science, and Literary Discourse, 1569-1750 ed. by Judy A. Hayden (review)

Ms. Hayden opens with a discussion of “Intersections and Cross-Fertilization,” the early modern era’s complex, interwoven conflation of arts and sciences. This line/ not-line is one I have enjoyed worrying with my long-eighteenth-century literature students as we adjust our imaginations to a time when, as Hayden notes, the seven liberal arts were also called seven liberal sciences. I will focus on some of this collection’s stronger offerings.

Daniel Carey’s “Inquiries, Heads, and Directions: Orienting Early Modern Travel” considers how precursors of the Royal Society and the Society itself addressed “what to observe in the midst of travel.” He helpfully takes us from “appricockes” to “wormes,” like a charmingly eccentric librarian highlighting priceless clues in a handwritten, dog-eared card catalog. From Spanish literature he then tracks “the development of questions, heads, and directions,” tracing de la Rameé’s efforts to systematize knowledge by Aristotelian logic, Zwinger’s 1560s masterwork on Renaissance knowledge, Methodus apodemica, and so much more. Mr. Carey’s key contribution is in demonstrating how Bacon employed observation-based induction, and how his legal training guided his exploration.

Jason H. Pearl looks at the “rhetoric of plain facts” of the Royal Society that became the preferred style to counter charges of “romantic embellishment” in chapter four, “Geography and Authority in the Royal Society’s Instructions for Travelers.” When he dropped the f-word, Foucault, I braced for opacity, but the article is less a lurch through criticalese than it is a promising (if somewhat unfulfilled) study of what he asserts is a Royal Society-facilitated move toward plain speech and entertainment rather than panegyric and empire-building.

Geraldine Barnes’s “Traditions of the Monstrous in William Dampier’s New Holland” generously discusses how “buccaneer, hydrographer, and natural scientist” Dampier’s maps identified Australia and southern regions with the monstrous. He refutes the myth of a race of headless cannibals with eyes in their shoulders and mouths in their chests, contradicting their credulous appearance in sources such as Marco Polo, Shakespeare, and Mandeville. Ms. Barnes traces Dampier’s influence through Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie and even in the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1911, all the way up to a rich array of social studies textbooks in the 1990s.

A brimming chapter from Holly Faith Nelson and Sharon Alker, “Writing ‘Science Fiction’ in the Shadow of War: Bodily Transgressions in Cavendish’s Blazing World,” about Margaret Cavendish’s protoscience-fiction utopian romance, falls in the middle between an excellent contribution (it is) and a piece that could have spent more time under the scalpel. Science fiction in the shadow of the English Civil War is irresistibly engaging, and the chapter is a clever expansion of the book’s interest in travel narratives and science. However, its effect is muted by anachronistic theoretical prose, sometimes loosely applied. Still, the scholarly world really cannot have enough Cavendish, and they do her fine justice, so I welcomed the strengths of the chapter, especially its conclusions about how the fears of the nation’s leaders thwarted abundant hopes for “innovative technologies . . . potentiality, plenitude, and peace.”

A sparkling example of fresh scholarship is Marcia Nichols’s chapter, “Roger Phequewell, Colonial Man of Science: Re-Reading Imperial Fantasy in Merryland.” Her witty, historically rich study considers an erotic pamphlet published by Curll that parodies the Royal Society and travel literature, while also exploring important matters such as contraception. She does not just mine this work for its admittedly lurid humor (although that is part of the engaging nature of the piece), but further addresses serious issues of the “sexualized and sexist language of science and medicine,” competing theories of conception, and the pamphlet author’s ironically empowering effect on women. It is a terrific chapter, and I hope that she follows it up.

In “Telescopic Voyages: Galileo and the Invention of Lunar Cartography,” Howard Marchitello explores “forms that the...