Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science Available to Purchase

Debapriya Sarkar’s Possible Knowledge is at heart a study of the literary methodology of uncertainty and the forms of knowledge it enables. Taking as her object of investigation “the expressions of skepticism, doubt, and even bewilderment that pervade Renaissance writing,” Sarkar looks closely at how early modern thinkers and writers responded to the “dual crisis of epistemological uncertainty and ontological precarity” presented by the “slow collapse of the Aristotelian cosmos” (1). Yet rather than set out to determine where individual Renaissance authors stood in relation to the threat posed by this collapse, or to what extent they accepted or rejected the new models and theories that came to replace it, Sarkar takes the inventive approach of analyzing the distinctly literary methods of thought that authors applied “to forge new theories of physical and metaphysical reality during this period of intellectual ferment” (1). The result of this approach is an illuminating...