838 Reviews across disciplines and across time. E. 0. Wilson's Consilience: The Unity ofKnow ledge (London: Little, Brown, I998) called forexactly such an integration in the face of the postmodern fragmentation of learning and deepening uncertainty about its interdisciplinary status. ForWilson, Bacon is an exemplary figurewhose intellectual values and aspirations we are advised to respect and embrace. Wilson's prescription for the twenty-firstcentury intellect becomes thedriving force for most, ifnot all, of these essays and some familiaritywith his arguments and their critical reception is a prerequisite for the fullappreciation of them. Jerry Weinberger tackles the question of reason and revelation, in particular fo cusing on the treatment ofmiracles inBacon's New Atlantis. He argues that there was no separation of religion and science and that scientists might have the power to deceive the senses and fakemiracles. Bacon remained ambiguous about a unified knowledge embracing religion and science. The gap could be bridged, but thismight not be in the interestsof faith.Catherine Martin effectivelydemolishes the claim that Bacon effeminates nature, leaving itopen to the exploitation of a 'masculine' science. Reid Barbour explores Bacon's attraction toatomism as 'rhetorically and conceptually accommodating' (p. I7) and for its ability to embrace subtle particularities. But its dangerous associations with atheistic materialism and the intellectual seductiveness of its elegant simplicity continued toworry him. Michael McCanles's illuminating study of the contexts of thepre-history of earlymodern empiricism tracksback to the fourteenthcentury and thedistinction between cataphatic and apophatic views on the status of truth claims with regard to nature. The former claim to express empirical truth, the latterpoint to the existence of a truthwhich cannot yet be fullyexpressed, the via negativa which might be seen as informingmuch ofmodern science. Rather than, asWilson would have it, relying simply on induction, Bacon held these two views in tension and was particularly ambiguous about the scope forhypothesis-as opposed toobservation-in natural philosophy. Perhaps thekey essay in the collection is JohnBriggs's examination of transcendent traditions and scientific perspectives in both Bacon andWilson. In both cases he sees a process of rejection of the transcen dental followed by its rehabilitation: inBacon's case under the influence of Ficino and in Wilson's by the need foran adequate theory of human evolution to account for the continuing importance ofmoral sentiments rooted in the transcendental. A price ispaid foryoking Bacon's work to Wilson's preoccupation with a different kind of intellectual fragmentation. Bacon, forexample, inhabited aworld of fractured religious discourse, but this isbarely reflected here. Secondly, natural philosophy is presented as focused on a homogeneous, undifferentiated nature, yet Bacon and his contemporaries distinguished between prelapsarian, fallen, and redeemed nature. Did his methodology apply to each of these and, ifso, how did itdistinguish them?The Great Instauration, as an apocalyptic moment, deserves, following Charles Webster, amore central place here. UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA J. C. DAVIS Speaking forNature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England. By SYLVIA BOWERBANK. Baltimore and London: JohnsHopkins University Press. 2004. Xii+287pp. 133.50. ISBN 978-o-80o8-7872-5. Sylvia Bowerbank's study is situatedwithin 'eco-feminism': a frameof reference that assumes 'explicit connections between society's treatment ofwomen and the degra dation of our environment, connections made apparent in thepatriarchal devaluation ofwomen and nature'. The historical and philosophical depth of herwork, however, takes it beyond the alluring myths of women's special natural wisdom and offers MLR, I02.3, 2007 839 instead a 'robust feminist scepticism' thatconnects ecological knowledge to the com munity activism that 'continues tobe amajor force in the "greening" of communities' (p. 3) and has proved amajor force in tackling one of thekey challenges ofmodernity. The author's particular attention to women writers seeks toassimilate the fullrange of theirwork, including letters and diaries as well as their contribution to scientific discovery and controversy, challenging the grand narrative of the 'rise of science' in seventeenth-century England. This attention throwsup a number of interestingcon tradictions in the social and literary relations that formed the gendering of scientific knowledge in thecomplex interconnections between thehighly contested concepts of science and nature. Bowerbank's attention to the gendered nature of scientific knowledge resists the simple polarization between scientific men and thealignment ofwomen with...