"This book investigates the relation between the physical sense of taste, and taste as a figurative term used to denote various forms of discrimination, judgment, and knowledge in early modern England. It argues that in this period taste played a key role in the cultivation of humanist erudition and literary judgment, in the development of the experimental and empirical methodologies associated with modern science, in theological debates about how best to access divine truth, and in the experience and articulation of intersubjective knowledge and sexual desire. It also explores the role of embodied experiences of tasting in the formation of early modern subjectivities, and probes perceived links between the lower senses and the feminine in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Attending to early modern notions of 'taste', I propose, facilitates recognition of the hybridity of early modern processes of knowing, which operate across modern binaries of corporeality and intellect, nature and society, and art and science"--.