Webster, Erin. The Curious Eye: Optics and Imaginative Literature in Seventeenth-Century England

Abstract

Webster, Erin. The Curious Eye: Optics and Imaginative Literature in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 224 pp. $80.00. 978–0–1988–5019–9. Erin Webster’s The Curious Eye makes a concise, provocative contribution to the history of optical technology and its relations to literature. Its seven thoughtfully written, well-illustrated chapters and ‘Postscript’ occupy only 195 pages, but they range widely and accomplish generative combinations. Insights abound here, including in a delightful section on calculus, complete with charts (pp. 132–48), which I wish had been further extended. The Introduction opens a bit misleadingly with a gesture perhaps aimed at presentist or self-focused readers: a discussion of current technologies (e.g. Google Earth and Maps, YouTube, Facebook, Periscope and other social media) and their various problems and dangers (privacy, decontexualization, access, abuse of power, etc.). But soon come a strong, historicist overview and detailed rationale, claiming the seventeenth century as ‘the historical moment in which human visual capacity through the application of visual technologies to the eye [...], a mechanical model of vision itself [...] helped legitimize these technologies as reliable scientific tools’ (p. 2). Here, as throughout the book, Webster connects the optical technologies not only to literature and language but to philosophical and ideological milieux; that century was also: