Master or Handmaid?: Dryden’s view of the New Science in Annus Mirabilis

Abstract

ABSTRACT Challenging the traditional reading of Annus Mirabilis (1667), this essay argues that beneath the optimism about the New Science in the poem, there lurks John Dryden’s cautiousness about technological progress and his reverence for Nature: by depicting startling imagery to exhibit Nature’s agency, complemented by the author’s inheritance of the Georgics tradition and Metaphysical conceits, Dryden implicitly expresses the attitude he believes mankind should take towards the Book of Nature, one of admiration, agreeing with Robert Boyle, that natural philosophy is the handmaid to divinity. In this sense, Annus Mirabilis demonstrates the divide between the intellectuals in late seventeenth-century England over the approach to Nature and testifies to the changing epistemology and attitude towards Nature of the time: from metaphysics to empiricism, from admiration to exploitation.