Contents: Introduction, Claire Jowitt and Diane Watt; The transparent man and the king's heart, Jonathan Sawday; Philosophy, Thought and Natural Knowledge: 'Things which are not': poetic and scientific attitudes to non-entities in the 17th century, Anthony R. Archdeacon; Points mean prizes: how early-modern mathematics hedged its bets between idealism and the world, Jess Edwards; Bantering with Scripture: Dr Archibald Pitcairne and articulate irreligion in late 17th-century Edinburgh, David E. Shuttleton; Religion, Politics and the Natural World: The politics of morbidity: plague symbolism in martyrdom and medical anatomy, Peter Mitchell; Restoring all things from the curse: millenarianism, alchemy, science and politics in the writings of Gerrard Winstanley, Andrew Bradstock; Providence, earth's 'treasury' and the common weal: Baconianism and metaphysics in millenarian utopian texts 1641-55, Carola Scott-Luckens; Gender, Sexuality and Scientific Thought: Journeys beyond frontiers: knowledge, subjectivity and outer space in Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World (1666), Bronwen Price; Gender, science and midwifery: Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book (1671), Elaine Hobby; The masculine matrix: male births and the scientific imagination in early modern England, Ruth Gilbert; From nymph to nymphomania: 'linear perspectives' on female sexuality, Bettina Mathes; New Worlds and New Philosophies: Thomas Harriot and John White: Ethnography and ideology in the New World, Andrew Hadfield; 'Adding to the world': colonial adventure and anxiety in the writings of John Donne, Richard Sugg; Alternative planet: Kepler's Somnium (1634) and the New World, Mary Baine Campbell; Bibliography; Index.