![]() ![]() In both immanent and providential terms, I suggest ways gender works in the plays to resist certain claims of secularization theory. Yet the plays consider these immanent understanding of supernatural activity within quite distinct providential frameworks that ground their own social and political theories. I read the plays’ different understandings of spiritual agents as reflecting processes of “desacralization” and “resacralization,” the shifting locii of supernatural activity in nature and the human body, including the senses and feelings. “Science and Secularization” engages theories of secularization to read the plays. The sequence of plays provides a historicized view of theological accommodations to this striking scientific development. Yet two of the plays closely follow the publication of Galileo’s Starry Messenger (1610), whose telescopic observations fueled Copernican speculations and presented a vivid new picture of the moon. These plays are linked by a mutual concern not only with spiritual agents – devils, fairies, and airy spirits – but also with the moon’s traditional role as a cosmological linchpin, the boundary between the Aristotelian spheres of immutability and change, and the most obvious source of astrological influence over the tides and the humours of the body. 1611), and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (c. 1592), my study focuses on three plays, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. Prefaced by a brief treatment of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (c. ![]() “Science and Secularization” examines dramatic articulations of the relationship between theological and cosmological systems at the turn of the 17th-century, a period in which both were developing under the influence of English church politics and new astronomical observations. ![]() Yet despite a recent religious turn in the study of early modern drama, comparatively little attention has been paid to its theological registering of the Scientific Revolution. The theological challenges of the cosmological distortions introduced by the “new philosophy” are well-attested in the work of 17th-century poets like John Donne and John Milton. ![]()
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