Rethinking the Book of Nature: Hermeticism and Natural Theology in Three Recent Studies of Early Modern Drama and Poetry in England

Three recent studies of early modern religion and literature—Jane Everingham Nelson’s Shakespeare and Religio Mentis (Brill, 2022), Martina Zamparo’s Alchemy, Paracelsiansim, and Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), and Katherine Calloway’s Literature and Natural Theology in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2023)—address religious ideas that defy conventional categories, including the divide between Catholic and Protestant. Each also offers careful readings of canonical works of literature in English while employing different methodologies in the process. Nelson and Zamparo pursue hermetic traditions rediscovered in Renaissance Europe, retracing the pioneering footsteps of Frances Yates in her groundbreaking explorations of magic as an inspiration for art and science. While both authors employ modes of allegorical interpretation that some readers may find outdated, Calloway offers more subtle interpretations that connect seventeenth-century poetry with shifting ideas of early modern natural theology, which she defines in terms of the capacity of nature to reveal divine truths.