This book explores the impact of biblical reading practices on scientific thought in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries. It addresses the idea that the natural philosophers of the era forged their new sciences despite, rather than because of, the pervasive bible-centeredness of early modern thought.

This illuminating new study considers the Bible as a political document in seventeenth-century England, revealing how the religious text provided a key language of political debate and played a critical role in shaping early modern political thinking. Kevin Killeen demonstrates how biblical kings were as important in the era's political thought as any classical model. The book mines the rich and neglected resources of early modern quasi-scriptural writings - treatise, sermon, commentary, annotation, poetry and political tract - to show how deeply embedded this political vocabulary remained,...

Kevin Killeen's debut novel, winner of a Silver Benjamin Franklin award from the Independent Book Publishers Association, is written with a keen sense of comic timing, and is a sweet, laugh-out-loud look at the innocence of childhood in the leafy Webster Groves suburbs of 1960s Saint Louis. From falling for a girl with no-good-for-sports stick arms and beautiful penmanship to jumping freight trains, smoking cigarettes, robbing the local Ben Franklin--and, in his spare time, trying to get to heaven--Patrick Cantwell is learning all about life at Mary Queen of Our Hearts parochial school. By...

The Browne volume in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series offers a comprehensive selection of the work of the author of some of the most brilliant and delirious prose in English Literature. Lauded by writers ranging from Coleridge to Virginia Woolf, from Borges to W.G. Sebal, Sir Thomas Browne's distinct style and the musicality of his phrasing have long been seen as a pinnacle of early modern prose. However, it is Browne's range of subject matter that makes him truly distinct. His writings include the hauntingly meditative Urn-Burial, in which the broken shards of urns found in a field...

The Bible was, by any measure, the most important book in early modern England. It preoccupied the scholarship of the era, and suffused the idioms of literature and speech. Political ideas rode on its interpretation and deployed its terms. It was intricately related to the project of natural philosophy. And it was central to daily life at all levels of society from parliamentarian to preacher, from the 'boy that driveth the plough', famously invoked by Tyndale, to women across the social scale. It circulated in texts ranging from elaborate folios to cheap catechisms; and it was mediated in...

Eight long years of grade school and nuns is about to end in freedom. Graduation But only if Mimi Maloney and her classmates Patrick and Tony can outsmart investigators who suspect, and rightly so, they're guilty of the worst crime ever in parish history. Mimi Maloney, an average student who never gets in trouble, shows her genius in love and crime in this tale of Catholic school kids enduring the last two weeks of eighth grade. Police and church investigators conspire to learn who put the stolen snow globe paperweight in the hand of Mary on the church roof, and suspicion falls on Mimi's...