The Tessera of Antilia. Utopian Brotherhoods and Secret Societies in the Early Seventeenth Century. Donald R. Dickson

volume's end how we might begin to describe the historical moment at which the marvelous is separated from a theological discourse and attached to a scientific one? Lorraine Daston's essay on how notions of scientific evidence emerged, in part, from changing attitudes towards prodigies and miracles is a valuable contribution to intellectual history precisely because of the way it attempts to document where and how ideas actually changed in the period. But other essays compete with her argument without even registering its particular claims, let alone challenging her conclusions. Because there is no sustained effort to offer consistency in terminology or to direct disputed points toward more open debate, it is easy to imagine that a monograph would be more consistently illuminating. Perhaps what is most surprising is that, while the experience of wonder is being constantly (re-)located, this experience goes remarkably undertheorized, with a few exceptions (Daston's for example, or the excerpted section from Stephen Greenblatt's still provocative Marvelous Possessions or the piece by David Summers on ancient aesthetic models of imitation, a piece that isn't even concerned with earlymodern texts). Taken as a whole, the essays simply are not posing questions — or discovering them — at a level that can sustain what should be a decentering experience even for the modern reader. Can it really be surprising, as one of the contributors argues, that that a 1607 text entitled Admirable and Memorable Histories containing wonders of our time should list "incident after incident" in which "the hand of God is seen in operation throughout the natural world" (177)? (The editor's introductory comment that this essay "provide [s] . . . the most exhaustive exploration ever written" about this text completely misses the point that, as described in the essay at least, there is absolutely nothing exceptional about what the text being exhaustively explored actually offers.) The problem here, finally, is that too many of the essays offer up new material for consideration without fundamentally enriching our understanding of the broader topic. ANDREW BARNABY University of Vermont