World Makers

The Author: William Poole is Fellow and Tutor in English at New College, University of Oxford. His interests lie in the intellectual history of the early-modern period and its connections with scientific and literary questions.

• Contents: The Physics of Creation: The Biblical Inheritance - The Aristotelian Inheritance - The Paracelsian Inheritance - The Cartesian and Gassendist Inheritances – The Preadamite Hypothesis – Chronology – Flood and Ark – The World Makers: Burnet, Woodward, Whiston – Babel and the Rise of Nations – Archaeology and the Silent Past – Vicissitude and Geomorphology – Fossils and Extinction – Meteorology, Cartography, and Globes – Magnetism and its Survival – Conflagration and Millennium.

«‘The World Makers’ offers a rich and detailed account of late seventeenth-century theories of the Earth. Written with impeccable scholarship and a highly engaging prose style, this book sheds considerable light on a seminal period in the history of modern science.» (Professor Peter Harrison, University of Oxford)«Though modestly presented as an introduction to debates over cosmogonies, this brief volume brilliantly captures a crucial moment in the history of modern science as well as erudition. With seeming ease and a keen eye for the telling detail, Poole navigates the intricacies of several disciplines that helped mould these debates – from Scripture and mythology to philosophy and natural history. His lucid explication of the momentous clash of old and new ideas over the formation, the age, and habitation of the Earth will appeal to both specialists and lay readers.» (Professor Mordechai Feingold, California Institute of Technology)«William Poole’s ‘The World Makers’ does more than contribute a seminal overview of late seventeenth-century English and European discussions on the natural and biblical history of our world: it demonstrates the central role these played in debates on biblical exegesis, antiquarianism, the origin of man’s tribes, languages and civilizations, debates that fascinated the learned community of the time, and continued to do so for at least two centuries.» (Professor Pietro Corsi, University of Oxford)«(...) Poole’s intelligent and crisply written history will make valuable reading for anyone interested in how early English scientists obsessed about their world.» (James Delbourgo, Times Higher Education)«‘The World Makers’ is a very fine work of intellectual history, and the first to explain the ‘earth theories’ in a satisfying way and adequately to situate them in their intellectual world.» (Alexander Wragge-Morley, British Journal for the History of Science)«Poole has written a splendid book, which clarifies the complex intellectual scene that existed in the second half of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century in England and displays the details and nature of the soil from which grew a number of the modern sciences. In fact the complexity of the situation is brought into focus for the first time in his exegesis. His impressive historical research reveals a mass of interconnecting strands of thought, in a topic that has never, I think, previously been treated in such detail.» (David Oldroyd, Archives Internationales d‘Histoires des Sciences 62, 2012)