Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post-Reformation England

Abstract

comptes rendus 197 of the Dialogo and stack the cards in Galileo's favour; resistance is futile, both scientifically and literarily, to Hall's Galileo.His disputes are mapped onto a caricature of Cervantes's rich world, and Galileo wins every time in the game of circular hermeneutics: Peripatetics misread the world just like Don Quixote.This, even though we know absolutely nothing about how, or even whether, Galileo read a word of Cervantes.This is a promising avenue for research, and Hall should be commended for her original approach and evident skill at close reading.But if the history of reading is going to contribute to the practice of history, and especially the history of science, it has to bring with it a different kind of evidence than that required by literary criticism.Hall's more recent work, indeed, has already moved in this direction, interrogating the library lists as historical documents and bringing the new methodologies of digital humanities to bear upon them.Galileo's Reading is the first step into a new kind of history.