Claire Preston's The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England makes a new entry into old debates about the relationship between science and literature in seventeenth-century England. The introduction, and in turn the argument of the book, moves among three different claims. The first is that despite many scientific writers’ repudiations of rhetorical or figurative language, they draw deeply in their writings on their humanist rhetorical training, and their knowledge of literary genres. The second addresses the question of influence; she describes ‘a co-dependent, mutually influential relationship between literary and scientific expression’, arguing that not just scientific language but ‘even the shape and structure of their investigations have a literary and rhetorical basis’ (p. 9). The third claim is, perhaps, the strongest: she makes a case for an identity between literature (meaning imaginative or figurative writing (p. 5)) and science, arguing that saying and doing science were frequently identical in the early modern period (p. 10). This third claim stems from the second, but also pushes it further: ‘For the most part, scholarship in the literary–scientific “genre” has been devoted to literary writing about science. That it might include the literary as science has hardly been considered’ (p. 20).

Chapter 1, ‘Orlando Curioso: the lapsarian style of Thomas Browne’, focuses on Browne's coinage of new words to accommodate new knowledge. Browne's style, she argues, is more than elaborate embellishment of scientific ideas (as his contemporaries might have had it); Browne's use of language is the form that scientific investigation takes for him. In the second chapter, ‘Equivocal Boyle and the enamelled telescope’, she moves from Browne's style to that of Robert Boyle. Boyle frequently repudiates ornamental and literary writing, but Preston examines his literary productions, from chemical dialogues, to Christian romances, to fictionalized autobiographical essays. Preston argues that Philip Sidney's works, both his Defense of Poesy (c.1579) and his Arcadia (1580s), were important influences on Boyle, and that Boyle maintained an ambivalent relation to rhetoric through his scientific career.

In the next two chapters the book moves from questions of style to questions about real and imagined spaces of science. Chapter 3, ‘“A blessing in the wilderness”: fictions of polity and the place of science’, searches for evidence of the places of science; that is, for descriptions of locations where scientific investigations actually took place. She points out that though the idea of, and name for, a modern laboratory began in the period, we have little evidence of the existence of actual laboratories. This may be because the places of science frequently occupied private, domestic spaces: John Evelyn described Boyle's bedchamber as filled with scientific instruments, and experimenters worked in their house's kitchens. Near the end of the chapter she examines country house poems from later in the seventeenth century, many of which do describe experimental spaces; in this section she argues that these poems map a transition from the country house as a seat of community to the country house as the residence of a (natural) philosopher in retirement.

Chapter 4, ‘Dining out in the republic of letters: the rhetoric of scientific correspondence’, dives into the archive of the correspondence of the Royal Society. The Royal Society, lacking a permanent space of the kind dreamed of in Bacon's New Atlantis (1627), developed instead a quasi-utopian vision of virtual presence and conversation via epistolary exchange. Though writers such as Boyle stressed that reports of experiments should involve minimal rhetorical embellishment, Preston shows work of figurative language and polite deference in these letters. She also demonstrates the important part that Henry Oldenburg played in his role as society correspondent and editor of the Philosophical Transactions, managing both knowledge and interpersonal relationships. Both the idea of a plain epistolary language and the idea that letters reproduced presence were, she argues, fantasies, not reflecting the reality of exchange among the scientific community.

In Chapter 5, ‘The counsel of herbs: scientific georgic’, Preston ends by considering the mutual implication of literature and science in the genre of the seventeenth-century scientific georgic. The georgic, as she shows, includes writings on plants and agricultural cultivation as well as writings on the earth, including theories of its age, its internal structure, and the relationship between the interior of the earth and its exterior. Examining a range of texts, from those explicitly embracing literary tropes and conventions to those that repudiate rhetoric only to draw on rhetorical conventions, she shows the inescapably hybrid nature of this genre in the seventeenth century. The chapter moves among a variety of case studies of little-studied works, demonstrating how, for example, different scientific georgics make arguments about the relationship between gardening and restoring knowledge in a post-Edenic world, and about the connection between a nation's soil and a nation's people. It ends by returning to Browne, who, she argues, is an anti-georgic writer.

One of the book's biggest strengths is its ability to cross the seventeenth century without being constrained by traditional ways in which we separate that century in literary studies: the usual state of affairs sees Renaissance or early modern scholars typically stopping around Milton, and the rest of the century being ceded to scholars of the long eighteenth century. As the book easily crosses the historical boundary of the English Restoration, so too does it move across disciplines, both in its subject matter (examining, for example, Boyle's imaginative romance and his scientific treatises in Chapter 2) and in its methodology (Chapter 3's concern, to identify the ‘places’ of science, is primarily motivated by a historical question, not a literary-analytical one). The volume is also rich in primary and manuscript research, and will appeal to anyone interested in an account of the complicated intersection of literature and science in the seventeenth century.