Claire Preston is a professor of early modern literature at Cambridge, specializing in the intersection of 17th-century science and rhetoric. Renowned for her award-winning work on Sir Thomas Browne and Edmund Spenser, she explores how the “New Science” and the era’s information overload shaped English prose and the cultural history of the natural world.
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In Musaeum Clausum, Thomas Browne catalogs imagined books, strange objects, and rare curiosities, revealing how early-modern thinkers sought to preserve and make sense of the fragile and fleeting treasures of the past.
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Claire Preston is a preeminent scholar of early modern English literature, currently serving as a professor at the University of Cambridge. She is widely celebrated for her interdisciplinary approach, specifically her investigation into how the “New Science” of the 17th century influenced literary form and rhetoric. Her award-winning research, such as her study on Sir Thomas Browne, repositioned canonical writers as active participants in the scientific revolution, highlighting the overlap between empirical observation and poetic expression.
Beyond her work on scientific prose, Preston has published extensively on major figures like Edmund Spenser and the cultural history of the natural world. Her academic career spans prestigious roles at the University of Birmingham and Sidney Sussex College, and she remains a central figure in the study of the history of information.Publications by this author
Bee
Reaktion Books | May | 2019
Claire Preston’s Bee tells the busy story of our long, complex relationship with this industrious, much-admired insect. Moving from ancient political descriptions to Renaissance debates about monarchy, to the conversion of the virtuous and civil bee into the dangerous swarm of the Hollywood horror flick, and finally to the melancholy recognition that the modern decline of the bee is due to our use of harmful pesticides and destruction of the bee’s habitat, this timely new edition could not arrive at a moment of greater buzz. Lively, engaging, and containing many fascinating bee facts, anecdotes, fables, and images, Bee is a sweeping, highly illustrated natural and cultural history of this familiar visitor to our gardens and parks. From beekeepers to anyone with an interest in bees’ intricate, miniature societies, to all of us who enjoy honey on our toast, the appeal of Preston’s exploration of how bees have woven themselves into the fabric of our culture is as expansive as the range and importance of these tiny workaholics themselves.
Cambridge University Press | March | 2005
Claire Preston argues that Thomas Browne’s work can be fully understood only within the range of disciplines and practices associated with natural philosophy and early writing on subjects ranging from medicine and botany to archaeology and antiquarianism. Preston examines how the developing essay forms the discourse of scientific experiment, and, above all, Bacon’s model of intellectual progress and cooperation determined the unique character of Browne’s contributions to early modern literature, science and philosophy.
Oxford University Press | October | 2022
How should science be written? It is a question that piqued natural philosophers of the 17th century as they experimented with the rhetorical figures, neologisms, verse-forms, and generic variety that characterize the literary texture of their work. Inspired laymen were quick to borrow from the new philosophy and from practicing scientists in order to deploy ideas and images from astronomy, optics, chemistry, biology, and medicine. Between them, scientists, natural historians, poets, dramatists, and essayists produced new, adjusted, or hybrid literary forms. The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England examines those forms and that literary-scientific texture, as well as representations of the scientific—the laboratory, collaborative experimental retirement, and the canons of scientific conversation—and proposes that the writing of 17th-century science mirrors the intellectual and investigative processes of early modern science itself.
The World Proposed
Co-authors: Reid Barbour | Oxford University Press | February | 2009
Doctor, linguist, scientist, natural historian, and writer of what is probably the most stunning prose in the English language, Sir Thomas Browne was a virtuoso in learning whose many interests form a representative portrait of his age. To understand the period which we more usually refer to as the Civil War, the Restoration, or the Scientific Revolution, we need to understand parts of the intellectual and spiritual background that are often neglected and which Browne magnificently figures forth.
This collection of essays about all aspects of Thomas Browne’s work and thought is the first such volume to appear in 25 years. It offers the specialist and the student a wide-ranging array of essays by an international team of leading scholars in seventeenth-century literary studies who extend our understanding of this extremely influential and representative early-modern polymath by embracing recent developments in the field, including literary-scientific relations, the development of Anglican spirituality, civil networks of intellectual exchange, the rise of antiquarianism, and Browne’s own legacy in modern literature.Palgrave Macmillan | 2000
Edith Wharton’s wide reading in the nascent disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and evolutionary theory of her day plays a role in her social fictions. She understands her world in binary terms of belonging and exile, of spatial boundaries and exclusions, and tribal behavior. She applied that intellectual framework to the struggle to preserve the Old World from the territorial and cultural threat of the Great War. In linked thematic sections, Claire Preston considers ideas of tribal inclusion and banishment, buccaneer figures whose money-energy overcomes tribal demarcations, and expatriatism, the self-imposed mode of exile which fed Wharton’s apparently chilly empiricism and was the origin of some of her most important work. She suggests that, against the claims of realism, Wharton should in fact be included in the early Modernist canon.
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