Handmaid to Divinity - (Series for Science and Culture) by Desiree Hellegers (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In Handmaid to Divinity, Desiree Hellegers establishes seventeenth-century poetry as a critical resource for understanding the debates about natural philosophy, astronomy, and medicine during the Scientific Revolution. Hellegers provides important insights into seventeenth-century responses to the emergent discourses of western science and into the cultural roots of the current environmental crisis.

Drawing on recent cultural and feminist critiques of science, Hellegers offers finely nuanced readings of John Donne's Anniversaries, John Milton's Paradise Lost, and Anne Finch's The Spleen.

Review Quotes

"Desiree Hellegers teaches us to return to our poets, not just for solace, but for artful and rigorous intellectual defenses against the absolutist schemes of modern science. Who would have thought that Donne, Milton, and Finch, using the weapons of metaphor, ambivalence, and the contingent image, could serve us still today as models of resistance to the hegemony of techno-science? We are all in her debt."--Julie Robin Solomon, author of Objectivity in the Making


"No one else has written a book that so well interrelates science, seventeenth-century English poetry, and gender."--Joel Reed, Syracuse University


"Thoroughly researched, clearly written, and at times engagingly witty, the book offers many valuable insights.... Many critics give lip service to the imperative of relating early modern literary criticism to our own culture; but here that goal generates a more specific and intense discussion of problems facing us at the millennium....[A]t its best that commitment sustains and justifies the goal the author announces in her final sentence: opposition to "corporate-sponsored and corporate-influenced studies that [mystify] the material effects of techno-science on the eco-system and on the minds and bodies of those of us who depend on it"-- Heather Dubrow, John D. Boyd, SJ Chair in Poetic Imagination at Fordham University