There's a lot in the seventeenth century that seems to be about authoritarian systems with top-down control of passive (human or inanimate) bodies: Calvin's theology, the might-is-right political philosophy of Hobbes, and, perhaps above all, the mechanistic material universe of Descartes. But it wasn't all like that. It was a century when censorship walls came down and publishing became easier in many places — at least for a time — and there were all sorts of anomalous and even revolutionary ideas around.

Rogers looks at one particular moment, in England around 1650, at the time of what Christopher Hill called "the revolution that never happened" (the Diggers and Levellers), when people from a surprisingly wide range of disciplines and political opinions became interested in an alternative kind of natural philosophy known as vitalism, which derives ultimately from the alchemical tradition of Paracelsus and is based on "the unity of matter and spirit as a self-active entity." This kind of thinking was used by the Digger leader Gerrard Winstanley to argue against tyranny and private property, by Margaret Cavendish to undermine patriarchy, by conservative poet Andrew Marvell to set the organic harmony of a garden (and the virginity of his teenage pupil Mary Fairfax...) against the political turmoil outside, and by royalist physician William Harvey to explain the circulation of the blood (it's not the heart that's in charge, but the blood itself that wants to be pumped).

Above all, of course, it was used by Milton in his scientific, historical and theological explanation of the universe in Paradise lost. Being Milton, and writing at a moment when the "inconsiderate multitude" had invited the Stuarts back and he himself was in a somewhat precarious political position, of course he doesn't use it in a straightforward way: his God is sometimes represented as constrained by the physical laws he has set himself, at other times as an authoritarian free to take arbitrary decisions as he thinks fit. Rogers has fun disentangling the apparent contradictions and suggesting how we should read them to try to make some sense of it all. A lot of this rests on understanding that what Scary-Archangel Michael tells Adam in his anticipatory history lesson in the last two books is determined by the particular didactic situation, and we shouldn't read it as though it is Milton talking to us. Interesting, and it was fun how this provided Rogers with his segue into Margaret Cavendish: what might Eve have been dreaming of whilst Adam was getting those two books' worth of higher education on top of the mountain? Could she have been anticipating the non-patriarchal, distributed-control universe of The blazing world...? ( )