Chapter 3 engages with literary criticism’s argument that English national imagining became increasingly spatialised under Elizabeth Tudor. Critics argue that cartography and chorography introduced a new spatial awareness into English national consciousness. This criticism, which ignores Scotland, misrecognises as merely ‘national’ the imperial connotations of ‘British’ in the sixteenth century. The chapter shows that sixteenth-century chorographic British antiquarianism is shot through with both nostalgia and imperial ambition: ancient place-names and local legends fill the idea of England with the immanent presence of the British past and the promise of a pan-insular, imperial future. John Dee’s claims for English sea sovereignty over the Arctic and the Americas depended on claims to Scotland. Chapter 2 shows how Spenser’s The Faerie Queene conjures the vision of an Anglo-British imperial island in which Scotland becomes inconceivable. Spenser fuses river poetry, chorography and classical poetry with these texts on naval power, maritime law and English sea-sovereignty to shape the love of Florimell and Marinell as an allegory of Chastity as key to English insular empire.

The chapter examines the rhetoric of imperialism in the period leading up to the Danish recolonisation of Greenland in 1721 (and its immediate aftermath). English privateer Martin Frobisher’s expeditions in the late sixteenth century first gave impetus to the search for riches in the Arctic. The slew of texts published in the wake of Frobisher’s expeditions provided the nation with the image of courageous Englishmen establishing claims to lands in the North Atlantic. The chapter analyses English writings that allude to Greenland in ways that constitute claims to land. However, these claims were not uncontested. The Danish crown sent out expeditions in the early seventeenth century, which were also documented in the medium of print. It is the aim to show how Danish endeavours can be seen partly as a response to English activity. A significant part of the chapter is therefore an inquiry into how Danish writers attempted to ascertain Greenland as a land belonging to the Dano-Norwegian crown.

This chapter discusses the historical origins and emergence of the distinction between experimental philosophy and speculative philosophy. It opens with a summary of certain disciplinary-specific shifts in the late Renaissance that led to an increased appreciation of the value of experiment and observation. It then turns to the crucial traditional distinction between speculative and practical knowledge, which can be traced all the way back to Aristotle and was central to medieval and Renaissance understandings of the disciplines. Traditionally, natural philosophy had been classed as a speculative science, but interesting new approaches can be found in Roger Bacon, in the practice of natural magic, and in mechanics. These developments paved the way for the emergence of Francis Bacon’s division of natural philosophy as having a speculative and a practical, or operative, side. Francis Bacon’s heirs were to embrace his emphasis on the role of experiment in the operative side of natural philosophy, and by the 1660s in England a new form of operative natural philosophy emerged that its practitioners and advocates called experimental philosophy. In many contexts, it was set against the older, speculative approach to natural philosophy.

In “Natural Philosophy,” Mary Thomas Crane charts the early modern movement away from Aristotelian natural philosophy, rooted in a version of nature based on everyday experience, and toward a counterintuitive nature, understood only through mathematics and artificially produced experiments. Examining the works of London-based practitioners of technical and mathematical sciences such as Robert Record, John Dee, Leonard Digges, and William Bourne, as well as natural philosophy’s most strident promoter, Francis Bacon, Crane demonstrates how the new version of nature that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came at the cost of an older, more intuitive understanding. The chapter ends with an analysis of Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a cautionary tale about using natural science to control people and nature.

Brandie R. Siegfried “considers three characteristics of [Cavendish's] volume of verse,” Poems and Fancies, arguing first that the book is "thoroughly engaged with philosophers and mathematicians, both ancient and modern: understanding the import of her poems often requires setting them in dialogue with those thinkers.” Second, Siegfried investigates the prefaces of Cavendish's poetry, further contending that they demonstrate a feminist sensibility as they explain her views for an audience that pointedly included women. Finally, Cavendish’s eclectic ideas are not simply the musings of a careless author, but rather are the works of a committed philosopher who uses the form of poetry to clarify her theories, making them more accessible to readers while “enhancing aesthetic pleasure through increased complexity and wit.” Giving special attention to Cavendish’s poetic revisions in Poems and Fancies, Siegfried further emphasizes the importance of Cavendish’s poetry for understanding the natural philosophy espoused in Philosophical and Physical Opinions, Philosophical Letters, and Observations upon Experimental Philosophy.

The Tudors’ Welsh ancestry and doubtful claim to the English throne rendered them conscious successors of King Arthur, and the mythology surrounding Arthur and Merlin became central to the construction of Tudor power from 1485 onwards. Accusations and rumours of magic were rife at the court of Henry VIII and played a key role in the downfall of Anne Boleyn as queen, but allegations of magic also swirled around Cardinal Wolsey in Henry’s early reign. However, it was not until the reign of Elizabeth that a Tudor monarch embraced her ‘Arthurian’ identity to the extent of seeking the advice of a latter-day Merlin, a role eagerly fulfilled by John Dee. At the high point of Dee’s influence a magically inspired idea of a British empire briefly influenced official policy under a queen so fascinated by the occult arts that she personally practised alchemy. At the same time, the Italian religious exile (and possible spy) Giordano Bruno saw himself as an ‘occult missionary’, bringing his particular brand of Hermetic magic to England.

Historiography concerning the relationship (or non-relationship) between magic (or the “occult”) and “science” was dominated in the 1960s-1980s by the “Hermetic” thesis of Frances Yates and its critics (including Robert Westman and Brian Vickers). Vickers in particular argued that the “occult” and the “scientific” are separate “mentalities” or paradigms. This chapter considers an alternative view. By tracing the fortunes of the theory of radiative virtue advanced by the ninth-century Arabic philosopher al-Kindi, which began as a “theory of the magical arts” providing a physical basis for magical operations, we can see that some “magical” ideas connected with the astrological theory of “celestial virtues” influenced later natural philosophy. Al-Kindi’s suggestion that all causation in the elemental world was effected by means of rays was taken up in the medieval perspectiva tradition, and elaborated into a theory of astral magic by John Dee, but continued to provide a model for action at a distance in the mechanist theories of seventeenth-century natural philosophers, such as Kenelm Digby, Walter Charleton, and—ultimately—Isaac Newton, who believed that the corpuscles of all bodies acted at a distance by “certain Powers, Virtues, or Forces” in a similar way to the rays of light.

In the remarkable story of the chance discovery of the Elizabethan astrologer John Dee’s papers in 1672, a humble household chest belonging to a married couple plays a starring role. The seventeenth-century antiquary Elias Ashmole recounts how one day the chest was moved, and in a secret hidden drawer the chest’s owners came across Dee’s papers alongside a little box, some books, and prayer beads. In Ashmole’s account, this chest, a seemingly ordinary piece of household furniture, turns out to be a miraculous repository of other boxes, whose contents open onto England’s Elizabethan and Catholic pasts. The Introduction considers this extraordinary episode in the light of an essay by Primo Levi, who proposes that ‘building receptacles’ is a distinctively human activity. In the literary and material cultures of early modern England, the box is one of the most ordinary and necessary of human-made objects. As Boxes and Books in Early Modern England will explore, the box is also an evocative meeting point between matter and metaphor, influencing the material and mental environments of early modern writing in numerous ways.