Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy: Intellectual Change in Late Seventeenth-century Britain

The rise of the new, experimental science coexisted with other intellectual traditions which displayed equal vitality, including historical and philological learning, attitudes to magic and the wisdom of antiquity, and anxiety about what contemporaries called `atheism'.The studies in this book illuminate this complex state of affairs by focusing on specific figures and episodes. New light is shed on the career of John Evelyn through the use of his extensive manuscripts, hitherto hardly exploited, and the attitude to astrology of the first Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, is reconsidered. Other important figures examined include Christopher Wren and Elias Ashmole, occultist and founder of the first public museum in Britain. These studies underlie the new theory of intellectual change in this key period propounded in the introduction.