Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England

242 Pages·2014·1.47 MB·English

by  Crane

Losing Touch with Nature
This page intentionally left blank
Losing Touch with Nature
Literature and the New Science in
Sixteenth-Century England
Mary Thomas Crane
Johns Hopkins University Press
Baltimore
© 2014 Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2014
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
Johns Hopkins University Press
2715 North Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363
www.press.jhu.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Crane, Mary Thomas, 1956– author.
Losing touch with nature : literature and the new science in sixteenth-century England /
Mary Thomas Crane.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-4214-1531-4 (hardcover : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-1-4214-1532-1 (electronic) —
ISBN 1-4214-1531-3 (hardcover : acid-free paper) — ISBN 1-4214-1532-1 (electronic) 1. English
literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. Literature and
society—England—History—16th century. 3. Literature and science—England—History—
16th century. 4. England—Intellectual life—16th century. I. Title.
PR418.S64C74 2014
820.9'003—dc23 2014006749
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book.
For more information, please contact Special Sales at 410-516-6936 or
[email protected].
Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book
materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at least
30 percent post-consumer waste, whenever possible.
For Thomas Crane and Parker Crane
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
1 Introduction 1
2 Aristotelian Naturalism and Its Discontents 19
3 Losing Touch with Nature 52
4 Spenser and the New Science 94
5 Shakespeare and New Forms of Nothing 123
6 Matter and Power 148
Epilogue: What about Bacon? 167
Notes 177
Index 219
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgments
A part of chapter 4 appeared in an earlier form as “Spenser’s Giant and the New
Science,” Go Figure: Energies, Forms, and Institutions in the Early Modern World,
ed. Judith H. Anderson and Joan Pong Linton (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2011), 19–37. Part of chapter 5 was published in a previous version as “The
Physics of King Lear: Cognition in a Void,” Graham Bradshaw, Tom Bishop, and
Mark Turner, eds., The Shakespearean International Yearbook 4 (2004): 3–23.
Parts of chapter 6 appeared as “Marlowe and the New Science,” Christopher Mar-
lowe in Context, ed. Emily Bartels and Emma Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013), 252–61, and as “Roman World, Egyptian Earth: Cogni-
tive Difference and Empire in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra,” Comparative
Drama 43 (2009): 1–18. Reprinted in Shankar Raman and Lowell Gallagher, eds.,
Knowing Shakespeare: Senses, Embodiment, and Cognition (New York: Palgrave,
2010), 102–15.
Q
This book took too long to write. As happens to many of us, I have spent the past
ten years serving as a department chair (for two different departments) and doing
other administrative work. On the one hand, I think the book may be better than
it would have been had I been able to write it more quickly since I had more time
to think about a range of possible objections to its argument and to read more
deeply in relevant work in the history of science. On the other hand, there are
now as a result of this extra time too many notes. I hope they will at least serve as
a resource for literary scholars pursuing similar topics.
I was sustained during these years by reading the work of, and especially by
talking to (and arguing with), a number of scholars also researching topics related
to early modern literature and science. Seminars at the annual conference of the
Shakespeare Association of America and panels at the annual conferences of the
Modern Language Association and the Renaissance Society of America have been
the site of especially fruitful dialogues. I’m sure I will leave someone out, but I