Milton and Nature: Greener Readings Milton and the Natural World: Science and Poetry in "Paradise Lost" Karen L. Edwards Milton among th Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England Stephen M. Fallon Contemplation of Created Things: Science in "Paradise Lost" Harinder Singh Marjara The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton John Rogers

1999 ◽  
Vol 62 (3/4) ◽  
pp. 423-444 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane Kelsey McColley
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Natural World ◽  
World Science

Writing for the Inner Eye

2019 ◽  
pp. 178-209
Author(s):  
Peter Auger
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
John Milton ◽  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Thomas Heywood ◽  
Technical Expertise ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
Extraneous Material

Abraham Cowley reacted against the tradition of divine poetry that Du Bartas embodied, arguing that scriptural poets needed to have technical expertise and spiritual insight. As later seventeenth-century poets like Thomas Heywood, John Perrot, and Samuel Pordage became aware of the limits of simply describing literal truths from the Bible and natural world, they reverted to allegorical and other figurative narrative structures that could accommodate higher truths to the human imagination and describe psychological experience. John Milton had known Sylvester’s translation since he was a teenager, but Paradise Lost makes purposeful allusions that surpass Devine Weekes, showing how difficult it is to apprehend divine truth, and how interpretation depends on our point of view. Lucy Hutchinson’s meditations on Genesis revise Du Bartas’ poetics to strip away extraneous material that distracts from scriptural truth.

Milton and the Natural World: Science and Poetry in Paradise Lost

2001 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 810
Author(s):  
Barry Spurr ◽  
Karen L. Edwards
Keyword(s):  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Natural World ◽  
World Science

scholarly journals Rational and natural theology in Anne Conway's Principia

2021 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-51
Author(s):  
Jonathan Head
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Philosophical Theology ◽  
Religious Epistemology

AbstractThis paper gives an account of the religious epistemology and theological working methods used in Anne Conway's Principia Philosophiae antiquissimae et recentissimae (1690). It is argued that the epistemic foundations of Conway's philosophical theology are rooted in a personal revelation of the existence and nature of God, which forms a framework through which the natural world can be approached and studied as creation. In this way, we can clarify both the place of Conway's work in the intellectual currents of the seventeenth century and various aspects of her metaphysical system, such as her account of creation.

The botanical works of Nehemiah Grew, F. R. S. (1641-1712)

1973 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-231 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Material Things

NEHEMIAH GREW was the first English plant anatomist. He was one of that closely knit group of amateur scientists of the seventeenth century who were consciously applying Baconian principles to the exploration of the natural world. The questions they were asking about material things were new questions, of limited and precise range. The answers they found helped to define the scope and content of new sciences, one by one. In this way Grew mapped out the science of botany. In the writings of these men are to be found a strenuous reaching towards a rational view and an attempt to discard the speculations and superstitions of past ages. Yet their work often showed a curious ambivalence, despite their brave words. They were men of both worlds and the old lies embedded undetected beside the new in their philosophy.

Fate of the Flesh

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Juan Gil
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
World View ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Scientific World ◽  
The Social

In the seventeenth century, the hope for resurrection starts to be undermined by an emerging empirical scientific world view and a rising Cartesian dualist ontology that translates resurrection into more dualist terms. But poets pick up the embattled idea of resurrection of the body and bend it from a future apocalypse into the here and now so that they imagine the body as it exists now to be already infused with the strange, vibrant materiality of the “resurrection body.” This “resurrection body” is imagined as the precondition for the social identities and forms of agency of the social person, and yet the “resurrection body” also remains deeply other to all such identities and forms of agency, an alien within the self that both enables and undercuts life as a social person. Positing a “resurrection body” within the historical person leads seventeenth-century poets to use their poetry to develop an awareness of the unsettling materiality within the heart of the self and allows them to reimagine agency, selfhood, and the natural world in this light. In developing a poetics that seeks a deranging materialism within the self, these poets anticipate twentieth-century “avant-garde” poetics. They do not frame their poems as simple representation nor as beautiful objects but as a form of social praxis that creates new communities of readers and writers that are assembled by a new experience of self-as-body mediated by poetry.

Laws of God or Laws of Nature?

2019 ◽  
pp. 58-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
The World ◽  
Divine Commands ◽  
Theological Understanding ◽  
Will Of God

The appeal to laws of nature as an explanatory principle is often regarded as fundamental to naturalism. Yet when the idea that there were immutable, mathematical laws of nature first rose to prominence in the seventeenth century it was deeply connected to a theological understanding of natural order. Descartes thus imagined laws of nature to be divine commands, and attributed their immutability to the immutability of their divine source. For Descartes, Boyle, and Newton, the invariable uniformity of nature was understood as a consequence not of God’s withdrawal from the world, but of his direct and incessant engagement with it. It followed that the world was to be investigated empirically, because this was the only way in which the otherwise inscrutable will of God could be discerned. Over the course of the following centuries, however, laws came to be reimagined as simply observational generalizations, or brute features of the natural world.

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