Written at the junction of literary criticism, intellectual history and the history of science, Nicolson follows seventeenth-century writers through the collapse of the older, closed cosmology.

Essentially, what happens when a universe of concentric spheres, correspondences, hierarchy and divine proportion is introduced, by way of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and the new experimental sciences.

Nicolson explores what a scientific revolution does to imaginative language, tracing the destabilisation of inherited images of perfection, the microcosm and macrocosm, celestial order and humanity’s place within creation through writers including Donne, Milton, Herbert, Crashaw, Traherne and Sir Thomas Browne. It is a FASCINATING study of how metaphors hold up against logic, when the old symbols remain available, but everything that made them coherent is disappearing beneath them. First published in 1950 and substantially revised in 1960, it remains an unusually readable account of how changes in knowledge alter not only what people believe, but what they can plausibly imagine. 

Columbia University Press, New York, 1960. Revised edition. Columbia paperback. Paperback. Considerable rubbing, scuffing and edge wear to wrappers, with small surface losses and creasing; pages age-toned. Internally clean and binding sound. Good condition.