Milton and the Natural World: Science and Poetry in Paradise Lost. By Karen L. Edwards. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv + 265; 17 illustrations. $59.95.

In this valuable study, Karen L. Edwards joins other recent critics who have challenged Kester Svendsen's once-hegemonic view that the science of Paradise Lost was outmoded in its time. But unlike earlier contenders with Svendsen- Stephen Fallon, John Rogers, and Harinder Marjara-Edwards examines Milton's paradise not in terms of contemporary "natural philosophy," with its centrifugal concerns of ontology and cosmology, but rather as "natural history," that is, as an encyclopedic collection of facts about flora and fauna. Rather than being scientifically backward, Edwards argues, "Paradise Lost precisely registers the complex historical moment of its making" (p. 2). She avoids modern paradigms and relies instead on the discussions of the early natural historians themselves to demonstrate a mode of inquiry into the natural world that is far less dogmatic, far more tentative, than modern literary scholars usually imagine. To these discussions of natural history she combines a heavy dose of Biblical hermeneutics, arguing that Milton's contemporaries had moved beyond emblematic meanings of "the book of the World" and instead felt obliged to perform an "experimental reading" of it.