The Invention of Discovery, 1500–1700

James Dougal Fleming is Associate Professor of English at Simon Fraser University, Canada. He is also the author of Milton's Secrecy: And Philosophical Hermeneutics (Ashgate, 2008).

Contents: Introduction: the invention of discovery, 1500-1700, James Dougal Fleming; 'That full-sail voyage': travel narratives and astronomical discovery in Kepler and Galileo, Piers Brown; Francis Bacon and the divine hierarchy of nature, Steven Matthews; 'Invention' and 'discovery' as modes of conceptual integration: the case of Thomas Harriot, Michael Booth; The undiscoverable country: occult qualities, scholasticism, and the end of nescience, James Dougal Fleming; Spirits, vitality, and creation in the poetics of Tomasso Campanella and John Donne, Anthony Russell; Perfection of the world and mathematics in late 16th-century Copernican cosmologies, Pietro Daniel Omodeo; Discovery in The World: the case of Descartes, Jacqueline Wernimont; Numbering martyrs: numerology, encyclopedism, and the invention of immanent events in John Foxe's Actes and Monuments, Ryan Netzley; Unearthing radical reform: antiquarianism against discovery, Travis DeCook; The discovery of blackness in the early modern bed-trick, Louise Denmead; Newness and discovery in early-modern France, Vincent Masse; Afterword: the art of the field, James Dougal Fleming; Bibliography; Index.