“In this terrific and wide-ranging book, Rachel Eisendrath provides a nuanced account of Renaissance defenses of aesthetic pleasure that challenges the traditional association of the early modern period with new scientific notions of objectivity. At the same time, she makes a powerful contribution to contemporary debates in the humanities about 'distant reading,' 'surface reading,' 'the new materialism,' and 'thing theory,' in the process reasserting the traditional virtues of humanistic education. Poetry in a World of Things is an exceptionally well-informed, theoretically sophisticated, and beautifully written work.” –Victoria Kahn, University of California, Berkeley