The Arts of 17th-Century Science : Representations of the Natural World in European and North American Culture

Contemporary ideals of science representing disinterested and objective fields of investigation have their origins in the seventeenth century. However, 'new science' did not simply or uniformly replace earlier beliefs about the workings of the natural world, but entered into competition with them. It is this complex process of competition and negotiation concerning ways of seeing the natural world that is charted by the essays in this book. The collection traces the many overlaps between 'literary' and 'scientific' discourses as writers in this period attempted both to understand imaginatively and empirically the workings of the natural world, and shows that a discrete separation between such discourses and spheres is untenable. The collection is designed around four main themes-'Philosophy, Thought and Natural Knowledge', 'Religion, Politics and the Natural World', 'Gender, Sexuality and Scientific Thought' and 'New Worlds and New Philosophies.' Within these themes, the contributors focus on the contests between different ways of seeing and understanding the natural world in a wide range of writings from the period: in poetry and art, in political texts, in descriptions of real and imagined colonial landscapes, as well as in more obviously 'scientific' documents. Cover Half Title Title Copyright Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction 1 The Transparent Man and the King's Heart PART I: PHILOSOPHY, THOUGHT AND NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 2 'Things Which Are Not': Poetic and Scientific Attitudes to Non-entities in the Seventeenth Century 3 Points Mean Prizes: How Early-Modern Mathematics Hedged its Bets Between Idealism and the World 4 Bantering with Scripture: Dr Archibald Pitcairne and Articulate Irreligion in Late Seventeenth-century Edinburgh PART II: RELIGION, POLITICS AND THE NATURAL WORLD 5 The Politics of Morbidity: Plague Symbolism in Martyrdom and Medical Anatomy 6 Restoring all Things from the Curse: Millenarianism, Alchemy, Science and Politics in the Writings of Gerrard Winstanley 7 Providence, Earth's 'Treasury' and the Common Weal: Baconianism and Metaphysics in Millenarian Utopian Texts 1641–55 PART III: GENDER, SEXUALITY AND SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT 8 Journeys Beyond Frontiers: Knowledge, Subjectivity and Outer Space in Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World (1666) 9 Gender, Science and Midwifery: Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book (1671) 10 The Masculine Matrix: Male Births and the Scientific Imagination in Early-Modern England 11 From Nymph to Nymphomania: 'Linear Perspectives' on Female Sexuality PART IV: NEW WORLDS AND NEW PHILOSOPHIES 12 Thomas Harriot and John White: Ethnography and Ideology in the New World 13 'Adding to the World': Colonial Adventure and Anxiety in the Writings of John Donne 14 Alternative Planet: Kepler's Somnium (1634) and the New World Select Bibliography Index