Current PhD Students

Dominic Gavin

Thesis Title:

Marvell and the Book of Nature. The reading and misreading of nature in seventeenth-century pastoral

Supervisors:

Professor Kevin Killeen & Dr Jane Raisch

Description:

The ‘book of nature’ – the idea that the natural world was like a book, written in God’s hand – was a commonplace of the seventeenth-century. The formula also features in many historical discussions of early modern theology and the development of seventeenth-century science. In my thesis I propose to join these discussions to the critical commentary on the poetry of Andrew Marvell (1621-1678). Reading Marvell’s poems in this context is revealing for what it tells us about his innovative uses of the commonplace, and the polemical intentions that his adoption of the topos might contain.

Email: dg1017@york.ac.uk