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Religion, Magic, and Science in Early Modern Europe and America by Allison P. Coudert

2014; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 9; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mrw.2014.0016

1940-5111

John Henry,

Australian Indigenous Culture and History

Reviewed by: Religion, Magic, and Science in Early Modern Europe and America by Allison P. Coudert John Henry KEY WORDS Allison Coudert, early modern magic, magic and religion, science and religion, early modern science, witch hunt, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, John Dee Allison P. Coudert. Religion, Magic, and Science in Early Modern Europe and America. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2011. Pp. xxx + 287. Professor Allison Coudert is an ideal guide for the three interrelated areas of theory and practice embraced in her title, and she here offers a fascinating and thought-provoking introductory survey to demonstrate just how closely interrelated they were in the early modern period. It is an added strength of her treatment that she refers throughout to the claims of earlier historians, thereby offering a useful grounding in the historiography of these areas, as well as a richly interesting account of their histories. In between the Introduction and an Epilogue, there are nine chapters, each dealing with different aspects of the historical picture she depicts. These include chapters on miracles, on witches and witch-hunting, on religion and the Scientific Revolution, and on esotericism and the Scientific Revolution. The last chapter, “A Test Case,” shows the complex interweaving of religious, occult, and what we might call “scientific” ideas, in the genealogy of thought leading from the alchemical medical reformer Jan Baptista van Helmont through Robert Boyle, to the most successful alchemical thinker of the seventeenth century, Isaac Newton (173–96). Clearly demonstrating the need to see these three ways of thinking as inseparably linked, the overall result achieves what no single history of religion, or of science, or of magic, could do, and provides a highly useful and engaging introduction to this threefold topic. There are many riches along the way, from an account of Hieronymous Bosch’s painting of “The Garden of Earthly Delights” as an unwitting illustration of the “taxonomic confusion” brought on by the proliferation of plant [End Page 232] and animal species discovered as a result of the voyages of discovery, to the revelation that G. W. Leibniz once mused that monads comprising a café latte he was drinking in Leipzig might later become human souls (23–24). We are shown the similarity between the thought of the Cambridge Platonist Henry More and Voltaire’s fictional creation, Dr. Pangloss. But More’s suggestion that the buttocks are designed to be “a natural Cushion,” (136) is said to compare favorably with Martin Luther’s belief that the broader buttocks of women indicated they were fitted to sit at home, confined to a domestic life (92). Inevitably, in a book of such ambitious and wide-ranging scope, some parts are more successful than others. In keeping with her own research interests, Professor Coudert is very good on issues of gender. This works especially well in the chapter on “Witches and Witch Hunting” (Chapter 4), one of the strongest in the book, but when the author pursues the theme of gender issues into the next chapter, “The ‘Godly State,’ “ it seems to obliterate other aspects of the Godly State that might have been considered. Given the overall theme of showing the links between science and religion, for example, she might have considered the well-known claims of Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer that the ordered state required a strong sense of the order of nature.1 Coudert’s chapter seems to say more about the state of the early modern household, rather than about the state of the nation. Generally, it seems fair to say that the strengths of Coudert’s account lie in richly textured description of the social and cultural context of the religious and scientific changes she discusses. Perhaps considering the interests of her intended audience, she has much less to say about the intellectual aspects of the themes she discusses. At one point she asks, “How could John Dee have ever imagined he could communicate with angels . . . ? Why did ostensibly sane and educated men believe old women had sex with the devil? What made Robert Boyle waste money subsidizing an account of a poltergeist?” The answers to these questions can only be determined by understanding what Dee, Boyle, and their educated contemporaries actually...