If the butterfly wings its way to the sweet light that attracts it, it's only because it doesn't know that the fire can consume it.

Pamela Smith and Benjamin Schmidt have gathered together a wide-ranging and provocative set of original essays that successfully demonstrate how contingent the process of making knowledge was during a period of fundamental epistemological change. This is a finely crafted and conceptualized collection.

Are you smelling me?” After yesterday I suspected that my body was giving him all kinds of information I didn't want him to have. “Don't tempt me,” he murmured.

She was like a camera that had been chronically out of focus until someone came by and twisted the lenses into alignment.

Remember the past - and await the future.

I saw the logic that they used, and the death of a thousand cuts as experimental scientists slowly chipped away at the belief that the world was an inexplicably powerful, magical place. Ultimately they failed, though. The magic never really went away. It waited, quietly, for people to return to it when they found the science wanting.

It begins with absence and desire. It begins with blood and fear. It begins with a discovery of witches.