Alembics: Penn Studies in Literature and Science seeks to publish the best work emerging at the intersections between literature and science from the medieval period to the future, focusing on scholarship that shows us how “literary” and “scientific” modes of representation and methods of argument came to be constituted historically through a shared attention to common problems.
Series Editors:
Mary Thomas Crane
Thomas F. Rattigan Professor
Department of English, Boston College
Henry S. Turner
Professor of English
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Staff Editorial Contact:
Walter Biggins, Editor-in-Chief wbiggins@upenn.edu
The Science of the Body in Early Modern Women’s Poetry
Whitney Sperrazza
Price: $65.00
ISBN: 9781512827590
Pub Date: June 2025
Format: Hardcover
320 Pages
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.
The Natural Laws of Plot connects the history of the novel and the history of science to show how plot in the realist novel is given shape by the characteristics of the physical world. Plot, Lee shows us, is immersive and powerful, because it satisfies our wish to know how things happen in a coherent, objective, and possibly real world.
Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England
Julie Orlemanski
Price: $74.95
ISBN: 9780812250909
Pub Date: May 2019
Format: Hardcover
344 Pages
In the period just prior to medicine's modernity, England saw a remarkable upsurge in medical writing. Julie Orlemanski's Symptomatic Subjects shows how late medieval English writers drew on the discourse of medicine to narrate anew the crossings—and the conflicts—between physiology and personhood.
The Wreckage of Intentions offers a comprehensive account of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century projects—concrete yet incomplete efforts to advance British society during a period defined by revolutions in finance and agriculture, the rise of experimental science, and the establishment of constitutional monarchy.
In Extinction and the Human Timothy Sweet ponders the realities of animal extinction and endangerment and the often divergent Native American and Euro-American narratives that surround them, focusing especially on the force of human impact on megafauna—mammoths, whales, and the North American bison.
