Tara E. Pedersen. Mermaids and Production of Knowledge in Early Modern England. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015. Pp. xi + 155. $104.95. Hybridity, monstrosity, and difference: these unstable early modern ontological categories are difficult to locate precisely or theorize vigorously. Tara E. Pedersen's Mermaids and Production of Knowledge in Early Modern England, however, deftly mobilizes conceptions of sexuality and identity to argue for cultural relevance of mermaids as objects of mystery and knowledge in early modern English imagination. Pedersen begins with Sir Thomas Browne's discussion of mermaid as a in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica and charts circulation of its representation and conceit. Pedersen notes how it becomes a way to 'think' or picture (3). The introduction highlights several theoretical trends to which work speaks, including feminism, queer studies, and animal studies. Pedersen's research deliberately intersects with these approaches but then moves beyond them to demonstrate how mermaid asks us to reconsider mechanics of seeing and acquiring knowledge on early modern stage. In this inquiry, Pedersen also sketches some of more resonant associations of mermaid in early modern culture. Adorning religious and domestic environments, mermaid traversed many iconographic landscapes and genres, including science, theology, and literary representations. In occupying a position of mystery, contradiction, and monstrosity, Pedersen shows, mermaid is a touchstone for exploring a diversity of early modern connections and forms of understanding. Chapter 1, Identifying Mermaids: Economies of Representation in Dekker and Middleton's The Roaring Girl focuses on urban topographies and figure of Moll, frequently identified as a mermaid, within economies of exchange and sexual energies. Such representations, however, are structured by viewers' perspectives, shifting and altering image of woman--virgin or whore--that one encounters. Moll elicits such contradictory responses and serves as a source for play's engagement with considerations of London as a sprawling urban locale and body of a woman as both monstrous and dissembling. Drawing on strands of criticism that identify Moll as a subversive figure, Pedersen argues that many representations of Moll--particularly as a mermaid--elucidate many signifiers of identity and economics in Dekker and Middleton's drama. The mermaid was identified with siren and often disparaged as a figure who seduces sailors to their doom through beauty and deception. Pedersen cites Queen Elizabeth's Armada portrait and Shakespeare's 3 Henry VI in her analysis of how mermaid disrupts economies of exchange and production. Interestingly, Moll is not only figure to be likened to a mermaid in The Roaring Girl. Sir Alexander, worrying father, is also positioned as inimical to trade and changeable in categories of identity: in cheating or refusing to obey tradition of open methods to exchange and instead acting secretively, Sir Alexander undermines play's London market of marriageable bodies and goods. Like Sir Alex, Moll resists expected roles and rules of commodity exchange. The following chapter, 'We shall discover our Selves': Practicing Mermaid's Law in Margaret Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure pairs Duchess's closet drama with representations of mermaid in religious buildings in early modern Britain. Regarding singular scene with figure of Lady Happy as a sea nymph, Pedersen argues the mermaid's role is pivotal because she functions as a critical metaphor for pragmatic process of becoming (or self-construction) that we see Lady Happy undertaking throughout play (55). Pedersen begins with a discussion of early modern shifting understandings of empiricism and Cavendish's response to role of women as producers of scientific knowledge in early modern England. …