Description
Book SynopsisThis fascinating book traces the growing awareness of that epistemological gap through textbooks and natural philosophy treatises to canonical poetry and plays, presciently registering and exploring the magnitude of the human loss that accompanied the beginnings of modern science.
Trade ReviewLosing Touch with Nature is a stimulating read. Crane gives clear explanations of complex philosophical and scientific subjects-particularly those which are unfamiliar to the modern mind-and sets out her argument lucidly. The view she advances is groundbreaking, providing a new perspective on an important period of history. Her book deserves a wide readership, both within academia and more generally, than just among literary historians. -- Clive Prince Magonia Review Crane's discussion is an exceptionally intelligent guide to the history of early modern science for nonscientists, as well as a useful corrective to some of the unexamined donnees of current writing about early modern science and literature. Perhaps because she is not a scientist or a historian of science, her care in explicating the state of scientific knowledge, its sources and traditions, together with the competing, mingling systems that offered such fecund ground for imaginative writers, is precise, clear, and suggestive. Renaissance Quarterly Crane's synchronic approach to multiple contexts related to science and literature resonates with current interdisciplinary views... Crane's approach to her material is comprehensive and represents an important resource for research. British Society for Literature Of the books that I found most rewarding among this year's crop...I would flag Mary Thomas Crane's Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth Century England. Studies in English Literature
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Aristotelian Naturalism and Its Discontents
3. Losing Touch with Nature
4. Spenser and the New Science
5. Shakespeare and New Forms of Nothing
6. Matter and Power
Epilogue: What about Bacon?
Notes
Index
