Light Without Heat

[B]y finding other forms of thinking within literature, and by practicing other forms of reading within criticism,... even the most familiar of texts come to be seen in a whole new light.... David Carroll Simon's magisterial Light without Heat [is] a highly thoughtful and revisionary study of the scientific imagination and, specifically, of the quality of thought that characterizes it in the seventeenth century.... Simon challenges the consensus that the New Science was responsible for prioritizing this mode of investigation [objectivity] by exploring what he calls the latter's 'observational mood': a quality of Montaignean carelessness... an aimless and patient witnessing that is neither driven nor teleological.

-- Catherine Bates * SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 *

Simon's careful close readings illuminate both the scientific and literary texts under study, while his overall approach of resisting reductive binaries (Baconianism as exclusively active at the expense of passive receptivity, labor as exclusively laborious at the expense of affective pleasure) serves as a compelling corrective against the tendency of scholarship on the history of science to slip into universalizing narratives. Scholars of seventeenth-century literature and science-and of seventeenth-century culture more generally-should find it to be a provocative and stimulating read.

-- Erin Webster * Milton Quarterly *

Light without Heat will gain deserving accolades as an innovative study of seventeenth- century literary and scientific writing.... [A]s an attempt at capturing and describing the shifting moods of reflection and observation that lie at the core of so much seventeenth-century writing, Simon has... written a deeply thought-provoking book.

-- Jonathan Sawday * Renaissance Quarterly *