PD Smith

Times Lit­er­ary Sup­ple­ment, 3 Sep­tem­ber 2004

Eliz­a­beth Spiller, Sci­ence, Read­ing, and Renais­sance Lit­er­a­ture: The Art of Mak­ing Knowl­edge, 1580–1670 (Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty Press), 214pp., £45.00.

Review by P. D. Smith

Nowa­days, we tend to think of sci­ence and lit­er­a­ture as two cul­tures which have lit­tle in com­mon. How­ev­er, Eliz­a­beth Spiller’s excel­lent study of Sci­ence, Read­ing, and Renais­sance Lit­er­a­ture explores an age when these dis­ci­plines were unit­ed by a “shared aes­thet­ics of knowl­edge”. Spiller skil­ful­ly dis­man­tles our cur­rent assump­tion that “lit­er­a­ture is fic­tion and sci­ence is fact”, argu­ing that ear­ly mod­ern writ­ers under­stood that “knowl­edge involves form as well as con­tent”. Sci­en­tif­ic and lit­er­ary authors, from William Har­vey and Robert Hooke to Philip Syd­ney and Edmund Spenser, wrote with active rather than pas­sive read­ers in mind: “read­ing is almost nev­er sim­ply under­stood as the acqui­si­tion of facts (dates, data) but rather as an act of doing or becom­ing that is achieved through the expe­ri­ence in some way pro­vid­ed by the text (mod­el­ling, repeat­ing, ver­i­fy­ing).” The act of read­ing in both sci­ence and lit­er­a­ture was orig­i­nal­ly a cre­ative act.

Spiller offers some fas­ci­nat­ing insights into how both imag­i­na­tive and sci­en­tif­ic writ­ers in this great age of dis­cov­ery used texts to cre­ate new knowl­edge through the process of read­ing. A fas­ci­nat­ing chap­ter on Galileo Galilei’s The Star­ry Mes­sen­ger (1610) and Johannes Kepler’s Dream (1634) his­tori­cizes the act of look­ing by explor­ing how the new obser­va­tions of the tele­scope impact­ed on the act of read­ing. Galileo’s par­a­digm-shift­ing text was rev­o­lu­tion­ary in both con­tent and form, intro­duc­ing “new strate­gies of read­ing”. But Kepler’s Dream, “the first fic­tion­al work to see the earth from a specif­i­cal­ly Coper­ni­can per­spec­tive”, trans­formed read­ing “into the mod­el for all acts of per­cep­tion.” Spiller’s final chap­ter devel­ops this point with ref­er­ence to the work of Mar­garet Cavendish. In the peri­od 1653–68, read­ing was grad­u­al­ly trans­formed from a “form of doing to a way of see­ing” and read­ers became pas­sive rather than active. Spiller con­cludes that after the ear­ly mod­ern peri­od “texts con­vey facts but can­not pro­duce ‘knowledge’”, and from this aris­es “the mod­ern assump­tion that all acts of obser­va­tion are acts of read­ing.” Spiller’s per­cep­tive par­al­lel read­ings of texts usu­al­ly kept sep­a­rate is a valu­able addi­tion to schol­ar­ship on the ear­ly mod­ern peri­od, as well as to the study of sci­ence and lit­er­a­ture.