In Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature: The Art of Making Knowledge, 1580–1670, Elizabeth Spiller binds early modern experimental science with Renaissance imaginative literature through the shared function of artfully making knowledge. Using example texts from literary notables such as Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser and prominent promoters of the new science, including William Harvey, Johannes Kepler, and Robert Hooke, she weaves a complex story about Renaissance literature and experimental science, following the threads of fiction and reading practices. Spiller assumes fiction to be more than a material object—or product—but also a means of doing, or practice. From this perspective, Spiller examines imaginative literature as a method of constructing knowledge and the ways in which science used fiction to that end. Not to be lost, however, is that this is also a story about readers and reading practices and the changes both underwent as the new science became established.

Spiller begins her argument with an examination of “Worldmaking” as seen in Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy and William Gilbert's On the Magnet. Spiller argues that experimental science and poetry—through the construction of the model worlds depicted within the pages of these two classic works—offered the power to make ideal worlds and conferred that ability and virtue upon the reader. She analyzes the ways that literary form worked to create knowledge. Ideal worlds—utopias—created by fiction and used within the new science serve as a foundational source for the remaining chapters. “Worldmaking” practiced dutifully and morally produced knowledge. By shifting the emphasis on the texts from the product—the small world created—to the process of making ideal worlds, the possibility of active participation, on the part of the reader, emerges. Readers were potentially active participants in creating knowledge, able to create small worlds with the aid of texts such as Gilbert's or Sidney’s. After establishing fiction's power to make “small worlds” (16) or utopias, Spiller continues with another significant theme, the “birth of the writer,” using Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene and William Harvey's Disputations Concerning the Generation of Animals as her case studies. Spenser and Harvey explained their theories of knowledge production in terms of biological procreation and generation. Chapter 2 reinforces the previous chapter by building on the theme of fiction as an act of creation and introduces the subject central to the remaining chapters—reading in the new science. According to Spiller, Harvey's text recognized tension between observation and reading. For her, this condition characterized seventeenth-century science.

Spiller then turns her analytical lens on reading practices and readers. She shows how Galileo's Starry Messenger created a new type of reader, who through Galileo's text could see those things Galileo saw, the way Galileo did. Spiller treats Kepler as a reader, solicited by Galileo to respond to the Starry Messenger. Kepler replied in the Conversation with the Starry Messenger and the Dream. The latter, a fictional account, created a world that dealt with the tensions between observation and traditional reading.

Spiller concludes with a lively analysis of Margaret Cavendish as a reader deeply aware of her displacement as an active participant in knowledge production in the new science. In Observations upon Experimental Philosophy and the Blazing World, Cavendish responded to Robert Hooke and Thomas Hobbes by articulating an understanding of reading that countered that promoted by the new science. Cavendish serves as an excellent bookend for Spiller's arguments. Cavendish realized, like many others of the time, the “made” qualities of literature and experimental science. She also realized the shifting meaning and practices of being a reader of scientific texts in the seventeenth century. Spiller argues, “Hobbes and Hooke write readers out of their philosophies of nature and science: indeed, those readers continue to remain largely outside traditional histories simply because they accepted both the knowledge and the forms of knowledge that Hobbes, Hooke and others created.” Spiller continues: “Cavendish not only refuses to be written out of such histories, her own texts imagine active readers who are not simply necessary to the creation of knowledge, but powerful enough to threaten that knowledge” (177). Spiller tells the story of a Renaissance reader, common to literature and science, invested with the powers individually to create knowledge, not just collectively to reinforce it. Throughout, Spiller shows how tensions between observation and reading created uncertain spaces for such powerful readers. The last phrase of the above quote is revealing; Spiller suggests a Renaissance reader, largely silenced by the new science, with a positive power of participation in knowledge production as well as a darker threat of intellectual disorder and destruction.

Elizabeth Spiller's intricate analysis weaves together works of literature with works of science. Such an approach offers a persuasive account of the interrelationships between early modern science and literature. She also tackles many crucial themes in Renaissance studies such as knowledge production and reading as well as identity and gender. Although theoretically sophisticated and perhaps difficult for readers not familiar with the focal texts, Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature offers important insights. For example, it places the utopias created by early modern promoters of the new science in a context of fiction and reading that does not sever the connections to scientific practice but instead illuminates them. It also provides a way to see how aesthetic form functioned, and how the form of texts, as well as the content of texts, proves valuable in understanding a society's culture.