A Brave New World of Knowledge: Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' and Early Modern Epistemology.(Book Review)

Publication: The Modern Language Review

Publication Date: 01-JUL-05

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COPYRIGHT 2005 Modern Humanities Research Association

A Brave New World of Knowledge: Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' and Early Modern Epistemology. By B. J. SOKOL. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2003. 274 pp. 40 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0-8386-3925-9.

At the heart of B. J. Sokol's latest contribution to Shakespeare studies is a presentation of 'scientific matters that have hardly ever before been discussed as significant to The Tempest' (p. 101), the most novel of which are some glass figurines recently recovered by archaeologists working at the site of the Jamestown colony. The discoverers of the se curios believe they were used as weights in prototypical thermometers; and thus Sokol adduces them as evidence that...

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