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

Mary Thomas Crane’s elegant book Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England provides a fresh perspective on the awareness and impact of new ideas about nature that emerged in the early modern period. Careful to resist a teleological narrative in tracing the development of science, Crane charts how Aristotelian, Galenic, and Ptolemaic accounts of the universe began to break down for sixteenth-century English writers. Focusing on texts that communicated “specialized knowledge of mathematics, astronomy, and/or medicine, designed in most cases to convey up-to-date knowledge about nature to a wider public” (22), Crane observes that “ordinary educated people” were aware of epistemological ruptures (19). These ruptures included, most dramatically, the Copernican hypothesis, as well as the appearance of a new star in 1572, the atomic theory of matter, the waning of Galenism, and the introduction of Arabic numerals. Locating Galenic and Ptolemaic thought under the larger conceptual umbrella of Aristotelian naturalism, Crane makes the fascinating argument that these older epistemologies continued to hold sway because they aligned with people’s intuitive and embodied experience of the world (12–13). Even today, Crane notes, when students in a college physics class endeavor to learn Newtonian laws, they instinctively employ Aristotelian concepts instead (3). Modern scientific advancements, Crane reminds us, are counterintuitive. Recognizing that “ideological structures grow out of and are intertwined with basic models of the universe” (147), Crane is particularly invested in exploring how the loss of an embodied and intuitive understanding of the world may have felt to early modern people.

In her first two chapters, Crane delineates the complexities of Aristotelian naturalism to show that when the prevalent natural philosophy proved inadequate to answer uncertainties or questions about nature, writers turned to the secrets tradition, supplementing intuitive knowledge with hermeticism, Neoplatonism, astrology, and alchemy. She then traces how writers from Robert Recorde to John Dee to Gabriel Harvey demonstrated awareness of new ideas about nature. Challenges to Aristotelian naturalism, however, rarely brought about a radical shift in thinking. Instead, sixteenth-century English writers tended to invoke a “contradictory mix of philosophies and methodologies” (82). In the remaining chapters, Crane examines how the literary works of Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare register various reactions “to the loss of an intuitive connection with nature” (9). Crane observes that we “can recognize traces of … new ideas in literary texts if we realize that their authors’ knowledge of them was piecemeal, took sometimes surprising forms, often involved misunderstanding of crucial concepts, and was often expressed indirectly or metaphorically” (9).

As Crane persuasively demonstrates, we continue to bring certain assumptions to our construction of a “scientific revolution” (1), often repeating the account that Aristotelian naturalism had its basis primarily in books, only to be displaced by “an empirical study of nature itself” (19). And yet Aristotelian naturalism “enshrined ordinary, commonsense, daily perceptual experience as necessarily the only way to access the truth about nature,” while new ideas such as “mechanistic atomism” or “an inertial theory of motion” were “not subject to directly empirical demonstration in the seventeenth century” (20). Crane observes, for example, that Galenic medicine was associated with making diagnoses based on “manifest humoral symptoms” (32), while Fracastorian and Paracelsian ideas about disease depended on theories of invisible transmission of “seeds” through the air (32–33). While other literary scholars have addressed mixed responses to these new medical concepts, Crane’s most innovative contribution lies in her discussion of the difficulties presented by the Copernican hypothesis. Challenging the long-held assumption that early modern English writers were ignorant of Copernican theories, Crane shows that Robert Recorde’s Castle of Knowledge (1556)—an astronomy text framed as a dialogue between a Master and a Scholar—“contains the first reference to Copernican theory in English” (61). Recorde’s inquiring Scholar raises “hard questions...