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Reading through Galileo's Telescope: Margaret Cavendish and the Experience of Reading*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Elizabeth A. Spiller
Elizabeth A. Spiller*
Affiliation:
Texas Christian University
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Abstract

This essay reassesses the role of reading in the context of seventeenth-century natural philosophy by analyzing Galileo Galilei's Starry Messenger and Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World. The unreliability of telescopic vision becomes a dominant metaphor for the unreliability of reading printed texts. Where Galileo sought to put the reader in his own position as a scientific observer by making reading a form of observation, Cavendish used the telescopic image to show how readers become the makers of their own fictions. From the recognition that reading and observation finally reveal our relationship to the world rather than the world itself comes what will ultimately be the modern assumption that acts of observation are also acts of reading.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , Spring 2000 , pp. 192 - 221
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 2000

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