Rethinking Science and Religion in Early Modern Culture

Early modern Europe provides a rich context from which to challenge the rigid opposition between science and religion in this bold new edited collection. Rethinking Science and Religion in Early Modern Culture approaches “science” and “religion” as overlapping and mutually defining modes of thought, belief, and practice. In addition to reconceptualizing the boundaries between science and religion as practiced and represented in early modern culture, essays develop new perspectives on gender and embodiment in considering works and ideas of the past. Some authors demonstrate how early modern natural philosophers understood their objects of inquiry, from human bodies to the cosmos, in theological terms. Others demonstrate how religious ideas shaped colonial exploration and the nascent slave trade as scientific enterprises. Still others put early modern poetry and drama in conversation with influential debates between religion and science. Across these various inquiries, our contributors challenge received narratives of secular disenchantment and liberal progress while questioning conventional assumptions about divisions between scientific and religious communities.

Together, these essays seek to redefine both early modern religion and science as fluid and expansive discourses in which the rhetoric of the past continues to return uncannily within the controversies of the present. Science and religion were and remain mutually and dialogically constituted forms of knowledge, belief, practice, and power. These wide-ranging explorations return to fundamental questions and assumptions that underwrite both fields while also working to establish new questions, archives, and intellectual genealogies.