Alexander Wragge-Morley's Aesthetic Science: Representing Nature in the Royal Society of London, 1650–1720 is a thought-provoking, useful, and ambitious book. Through the introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion, Wragge-Morley's main aim is to make sense of some of the ways in which the interplay of sensory experience with knowledge production affected the work of a number of Royal Society Fellows from before its foundation until the 1720s. The introduction effectively functions as the first chapter because Wragge-Morley engages with the relevant historiography diffusely throughout the book. Likewise, in the conclusion he does not so much sum up the main arguments as further argue and develop ideas until the very last sentence, whetting the reader's appetite for more. Aesthetic Science is indeed an engaging piece of scholarship, thanks to Wragge-Morley's fluid prose, many concrete examples, and careful selection of evidence.

In the first chapter, “Physico-Theology, Natural Philosophy, and Sensory Experience,” Wragge-Morley takes aim at Dmitri Levitin, Scott Mandelbrote, and Neal Gillespie, among others, arguing that John Ray and Robert Boyle's design arguments were much more than just tools to reaffirm conventional religious beliefs, in that they were forms of knowledge production that reflected particular ways of letting the senses guide their research. While one can see good reasons to agree, at least partly, with Wragge-Morley, one is baffled by his word choice in discussing fundamental Aristotelian points. Why use “purposiveness” (29 and passim) instead of “potency”? Pre-Kantian authors read Aristotle. Wragge-Morley should have made it clear that Kant's “purposiveness” was an elaboration on the Aristotelian “potency” and should have used the Aristotelian word when referring to scholastic thinkers.

The second chapter, “An Empiricism of Imperceptible Entities,” examines two works by Robert Boyle. It is an interesting analysis of the uses of representational strategies in theological works, in that “philosophers of the seventeenth century did not always share today's assumption that belief—rather than knowledge—motivates religious ideas” (70). The third chapter, “In Search of Lost Design,” is problematic. It opens with the claim, “It has never been noted . . . that an interest in the interpretation of ruins was common to the Royal Society's architectural interests and its work on natural history” (74). This claim is inaccurate, as both historians of art and historians of antiquarianism—from Matthew Walker and Dariusz Gafijczuk, to Rosemary Sweet and Ruth Scurr, to mention but a few—have published on the subject. Indeed, the broader issue with the chapter is Wragge-Morley's reluctance to use art historical works for a subject that naturally lends itself to scrutiny from that angle.

It is fascinating to read that Robert Hooke believed snowflakes to be the ruins of crystals, and, therefore, that “the physico-theological assertion of God's role in creation had aesthetic consequences”; however, it does not follow at all that “if God had designed nature, it followed that natural things should be both beautiful and perfectly designed, both form exactly matching function” (75). It does not follow because seventeenth-century art had already severed the link between form and function—think of Baroque art—so for physico-theologians to build it up again it implied the will to do it against current artistic practices. It would have been useful to place the physico-theologians in the story, such as Hooke, against their art historical background. Doing so would have supplied readers with more contextual knowledge, especially at a time when their engagement with the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire of 1666 meant that they were uncommonly familiar with art and architecture given Britain's recent puritanical attacks on the arts. Likewise, more context could have been provided about John Webb and Inigo Jones. The Anglocentric perspective is frustrating because their works can be understood only in the context of the introduction of Italian art through the mediation of French classical style. It does seem odd not to find anything about it or an art historical reference work in the endnotes other than just two recent North American books on aspects of Renaissance architecture.

The fourth chapter, “Verbal Picturing,” uses analysis of the strategies for representing nature through both words and pictures. Building on Steven Shapin's description of Boyle's rhetoric, and on Sachiko Kusukawa's research on the uses of pictures in sixteenth-century natural historical works, Wragge-Morley builds a case for the early Royal Society's own. The fifth chapter, “Natural Philosophy and the Cultivation of Taste,” aims to show that “the vocabulary of aesthetic judgement enables us to grasp how Ray and his contemporaries reconciled the desire for objectivity with their recognition that the affective dimensions of sensory experience were central to the work of knowledge production” (136). This is where Wragge-Morley is at his best. The evidence selected is eloquently presented, and the reader is left with a clear grasp of the book's argument. Wragge-Morley's Aesthetic Science is going to become a staple for history of science postgraduates and specialists alike. One only hopes that the sequel will make more use of art historical scholarship to build an even bolder narrative, something of which Wragge-Morley is clearly capable.