Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: A New Instrument The Clockwork Self: Mechanical Clockwork and Early Modern Discipline Confessions of a Man in Print: Cataloguing Erasmian Literary Ambition Painted Words Put into the Press: The Forms and Functions of Ambition in Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender All Works and No Plays: Jonson's 1616 Folio and the Redefinition of Dramatic Authorship 175 The Nimble Gunner and the Versatile Prince: Agility and the Early Modern Military Revolution 219 Perspectives on Perspective: The Philosophic Eye and the Prehistory of the Telescope the and the Microscope 252 'A New Perspective Glass': Telescopic Discoveries of Universal Uniformity 281 'To see a World in a Grain of Sand': Microscopic Perspectives on Subvisible Wonders