Broad-minded, ambitious, well-read, and socially inept, Gabriel Harvey was probably one of the most visible literary personalities of his day. Out of a prosperous middle-class background, he carved a multiform personal and public career. He became an eminent and controversial university teacher and scholar who challenged the orthodoxy of Aristotelian logic, conservative humanist pedagogy, Galenic medicine, and Ptolemaic cosmology by endorsing Ramist, Paracelsian, and Copernican models; he taught Latin rhetoric, Greek, civil law, and medicine. In addition, Harvey was a skilled Latin poet; a fringe member of the political and literary circle surrounding Sir Philip Sidney and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester; an intimate friend of Edmund Spenser; a persistent and antagonistic participant in a notorious war of words with Thomas Nashe; a prodigious annotator of the books in his vast library; and a proponent of beautiful handwriting, of consistent phonetic orthography, and of marking the beginning of...