"With this engaging book, Alexander Wragge-Morley joins a body of new scholarship that draws attention to the nuanced history of the early Royal Society, addressing practices and discursive activities that have fallen outside of the scope of a more traditional history of institutions. Arguing against the classical reading of the early Royal Society as exemplifying a new dispassionate and objective study of nature in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Wragge-Morley instead demonstrates the importance of subjective and affective states in shaping the epistemological framework of the Society's activities. [The] ambitious book covers a wide range of topics that have been broadly overlooked in the history of the early Royal Society, from the formative influence of physico-theology to the role of rhetoric and experiences of pleasure in the creation and transmission of knowledge. Wragge-Morley successfully offers the reader a history that captures the clear interplay between theology, rhetoric, natural history and even briefly archaeology and architecture. As a contribution to the history of science, this work powerfully demonstrates the continuity of knowledge practices across disciplines whose boundaries have often remained too fixed, adding further nuance and interest to this active field of contemporary scholarship.".