Exploring the imaginative habits of thought of early modern thinkers—including Shakespeare, Milton, Sidney, Bacon, Spenser, and Cavendish—Possible Knowledge enacts a history of ideas that centers literary studies and suggests that what we term a history of science might ultimately be a history of the imagination.

Lucifer’s Land invites readers into the social, cultural, and material world of premodern miners. Drawing on a wide array of historical and archaeological sources, G. Geltner argues that miners’ transformation of rural society, culture, and environments was and has been substantial and lasting.

In Necessary Inventions, E. R. Truitt uses thirteenth-century philosopher Roger Bacon—and his characterization as a prophetic figure of scientific modernity—to reveal the medieval thinking that enabled modern science to tell a story of scientific development that erased non-Christian texts, actors, and cultures from the history of science.

An exploration of the history of auditory attention between roughly 1800 and 1930, The Attentive Ear probes the origins, key theories, and experimental trajectories of attentional discourses around the globe, demonstrating the central role of audition in shaping our conceptions of focus and distraction.

The Fly Room tells the story of Nobel Prize-winning biologist Thomas Hunt Morgan’s laboratory at Columbia University where he and his students, by experimenting with and breeding fruit flies, invented genetics, which would eventually lead to the refutation of the theory of eugenics and prove Darwin’s theory of evolution right.

The Art of Knowing Everything explores the legacy of medieval philosopher and theologian Ramon Llull, tracing the transformation of Llull’s philosophical system, known as the Art (Latin Ars), through medieval and early modern book technology.

The years 1945 to 2020, from the testing of the first atomic bomb to the rise of artificial intelligence, constitute the “American century,” which coincides with the rise and fall of the United States as a global power. Arnold Thackray’s pioneering expertise in the history of science provides a unique perspective from which to tell this story.

Tracing the pathways through which sound traveled across a variety of conceptual and physical domains in the first half of the twentieth century, Sonic Circulations not only proposes a new account of the role of music, sound, and voice in modern knowledge production but also poses urgent questions about technology and empire.

Anatomical Forms excavates the shared material practices of women’s poetic work and anatomical study in early modern England. Whitney Sperrazza demonstrates how women writers such as Margaret Cavendish and Hester Pulter wielded poetics as a tool for scientific work in order to explore and challenge rapid developments in anatomy and physiology.