Desert Hawk Books

Handmaid to Divinity
Natural Philosophy, Poetry, and Gender in Seventeenth-Century England

Desiree Hellegers

 

 

240  pages
5.5" x 8.5"
Hardcover

Quantity:  $34.95 & S/H  

 

In Handmaid to Divinity, Desiree Hellegers establishes seventeenth-century poetry as a critical resource for understanding the debates about natural philosophy, astronomy, and medicine during the Scientific Revolution. Hellegers provides important insights into seventeenth-century responses to the emergent discourses of western science and into the cultural roots of the current environmental crisis.
     Drawing on recent cultural and feminist critiques of science, Hellegers offers finely nuanced readings of John Donne's Anniversaries, John Milton's Paradise Lost, and Anne Finch's The Spleen. These poems, the author argues, critique and undermine representations of women and feminized nature that figure prominently in the works of natural philosophers, including Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, John Wilkins, and Thomas Sydenham. By invoking nature as "Second Scripture" and "handmaid to divinity," the philosophers impel - and sanctify - the technological transformation of the natural world into an emblem of the power of God, king, and godly English gentlemen.

"No one else has written a book that so well interrelates science, seventeenth-century English poetry, and gender." - Joel Reed, Syracuse University

Desiree Hellegers is Assistant Professor of English at Washington State University.