Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England by Mary Thomas Crane (review)

Mary Thomas Crane’s Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England explores some of the literary resonances of early modern scientific developments. This book is a welcome foray into literature and science studies, which tend to focus on post-Enlightenment literature written at a time when “science” was a more distinct discipline in relation to other forms of knowledge. Crane resists the common conception that while the sixteenth century saw many key developments in science, a good number of these developments were not well-known outside of the realm of scientific practice, as key texts such as Copernicus’s De revolutionibus supposedly did not circulate widely outside invested readerships. Crane argues that, to the contrary, sixteenth-century literary authors had access to the new ideas of science, and that these ideas had a profound impact on their worldview, producing ethical and aesthetic anxiety about the stability of the cosmos and the human place in it. She suggests that in order to understand the depth of that cultural anxiety we have to look beyond the handful of overt statements about science (such as Donne’s famous passage in “The First Anniversary”) to consider a broader range of metaphors and symbols that reflect scientific paradigms such as a heliocentric cosmos, number theory, and atomistic theories of matter. All of these developments, she posits, had the overall effect of alienating literary writers from an “intuitive” experience of nature, specifically the Aristotelian universe, which to that point had provided such a rich metaphoric language for describing human experience.

Crane’s overall point is that the presence of science in sixteenth-century literature is diffuse and multidirectional, and must be read through fragments and glancing references in larger, more dominant discussions. Crane turns our attention to less well-known passages and references in sixteenth-century literature: with the exception of King Lear and Book II of the Faerie Queene, the texts she discusses tend to be those that are associated with, but not central to, the teachable canon of sixteenth-century English literature. This serves to remind us that the canonical view of the sixteenth century is partial and incomplete, and that a much broader body of literature exists that reflects the experiences and values of that era—literature not widely read today, but nevertheless helpful in reconstructing the intellectual life of that century. Crane’s project is also noteworthy for combining established sources in the history of science, such as Robert Recorde, Leonard and Thomas Digges, John Dee, William Gilbert, and Thomas Harriot, with lesser-known authors, including Thomas Elyot, Gabriel Harvey, Francis Shakelton, William Fulke, and Richard Bostocke.

Crane’s first three chapters establish the historical and cultural context of her readings, with her main argument being that during the sixteenth century the Aristotelian worldview was increasingly challenged by scientific theories with “less intuitive” accounts of nature. More specifically, in Chapter 3, “Losing Touch with Nature,” she draws on the treatises discussed in Chapter 2 to propose four stages in this movement. The first stage was before 1540; Aristotle’s explanations could be upheld if specialized instruments were used. Next, from around 1540 to 1560, we see the belief that the truth of things could not be directly accessed through the senses, but that it required special hermeneutics—instructions “in how to read the ‘signs’ and ‘tokens’ that appear on the surface” (52). From 1550 to 1570 (which overlaps with the second stage) the contradictions of theory and empirical data still allowed Aristotelian explanations to be justified as a kind of optical illusion. Finally, after 1572 and the appearance of Tycho Brahe’s supernova, any hope of rescuing the Aristotelian system vanished; the authors in this fourth stage sought solutions in the “secret” traditions that “purported to offer access to hidden (‘occult’) knowledge” (53).

Crane is right...