Chop and change

Even if the sound of “cultural actors continually negotiate meanings produced by the contestation of new narratives vying for interpretive authority” doesn’t appeal, it might be worth persisting with The Word of God and the Languages of Man by James Bono (University of Wisconsin Press, £19.95, ISBN 0 299 14794 0) if you have a serious interest in how the Scientific Revolution produced its changes. A demanding, scholarly book, Bono makes the case that our interpretation is flawed because we fail to perceive how narrative changed during the 16th and 17th centuries.