Supervisor: Dr Kathryn Murphy
My project is provisionally entitled ‘Hidden Minds, Minerals, and Meanings: Extractive and Unreachable Zones in Interregnum and Restoration Writings on Nature’. I am researching representations of nature and natural resources across poetry and natural theology in 17th-century England. I focus on the Cambridge Platonist Henry More: his early platonic poetry, his scurrilous pamphlet war with Thomas Vaughan, his Latin letters to René Descartes and English ones to Anne Conway, his vernacular prose works of physico-theology, and his later philosophical dialogues. I am also exploring the wider intellectual culture he was immersed in, particularly in dialogue with the works of Francis Bacon, Thomas and Henry Vaughan, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, and Athanasius Kircher.
