Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Note on the text
- Prologue: Setting – and unsettling – the stage
- Introduction: The space of the supernatural
- Chapter 1 The devil's in the archive: Ovidian physics and Doctor Faustus
- Chapter 2 Scene at the deathbed: Ars moriendi, Othello, and envisioning the supernatural
- Chapter 3 When hell freezes over: The fabulous Mount Hecla and Hamlet's infernal geography
- Chapter 4 Metamorphic cosmologies: The world according to Calvin, Hooker, and Macbeth
- Chapter 5 Divine geometry in a geodetic age: Surveying, God, and The Tempest
- Epilogue: Re-enchanting geography
- Notes to the text
- Index
Chapter 5 - Divine geometry in a geodetic age: Surveying, God, and The Tempest
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Note on the text
- Prologue: Setting – and unsettling – the stage
- Introduction: The space of the supernatural
- Chapter 1 The devil's in the archive: Ovidian physics and Doctor Faustus
- Chapter 2 Scene at the deathbed: Ars moriendi, Othello, and envisioning the supernatural
- Chapter 3 When hell freezes over: The fabulous Mount Hecla and Hamlet's infernal geography
- Chapter 4 Metamorphic cosmologies: The world according to Calvin, Hooker, and Macbeth
- Chapter 5 Divine geometry in a geodetic age: Surveying, God, and The Tempest
- Epilogue: Re-enchanting geography
- Notes to the text
- Index
Summary
[I]n the beginning God did square and proportion the heauens for the earth, vsing his rule, leauell, and compasse . . .
Godfrey Goodman, The Fall of Man (1616), p. 16At the turn of the seventeenth century, the structure of the universe was in play. As I discussed in the previous chapter, different ways of understanding the cosmos were interrelated with reformist theologies. For John Calvin, the universe was sustained by divine Providence, by the will of God. While God had indeed established a magnificent order of the world, ultimately everything – the spin of planets, the fall of a raindrop, the motion of a human will – was controlled by the hand of the divine. For Richard Hooker, cosmic order rested on natural law, a law that God had established but one to which God also adhered. For the individual, these different strands of Protestant theology entailed not only different possibilities for one's relationship with the divine, but different ways of conceptualizing the world one inhabits.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare's EnglandSpaces of Demonism, Divinity, and Drama, pp. 168 - 218Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011