CEFISES Seminar: Jana De Kockere, « Nature’s 17th century decay: A history of the controversy between Godfrey Goodman and George Hakewill »

Livestream https://www.youtube.com/@CEFISES

Series: HPS

Speaker: Jana De Kockere (UGent)

Title: « Nature’s 17th century decay: A history of the controversy between Godfrey Goodman and George Hakewill »

Abstract

In this talk I will sketch parts of my thesis (in process) on the 17th century controversy on nature’s decay between Godfrey Goodman and George Hakewill. In The Fall of Man, or the Corruption of Nature (1616), Goodman expressed a belief that is supposed to have been very common and popular at the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th century in Western Europe: that nature was old, ill, dying, and that her end was near. And the signs were clear: failed harvests, floods, pests, other diseases, ice-cold winters. Think of the famous Breughel winter landscapes: the sun was really diminishing.

Eleven years later, in 1627, George Hakewill published An Apologie for the Power and Providence of God in the Government of the World. He proposed it as an “examination and censor of the common error touching natures perpetuall and universall decay”. Goodman reacted to the Apologie in letters sent to Hakewill, to which Hakewill responded, and this correspondence was included as an extra fifth book to the republication of Hakewill’s Apologie in 1635.

That fifth book constitutes what came to be known as the ‘controversy’ between Goodman and Hakewill on nature’s decay. There’s a fact about that controversy that makes its case stranger than it otherwise would be, and that is its own marginality, or peripherality. The controversy between Goodman and Hakewill seems in different ways to have been rather insignificant. It is moreover curious how little disagreement there has been on the correct interpretation of Goodman and Hakewill’s works while they are supposed to be epitomizing a very popular belief and its successful rebuttal, given also the fact that already during the second half of the 17th century but especially during the 20th century, their controversy came to be inscribed in the history of that otherwise very contested epistemic object, ‘the Scientific Revolution’.

As the seeming relevance of the case is growing, since Goodman’s apocalyptic lament over nature’s illness and corruption caused by human arrogance strangely echoes our current ecological crisis, I will follow a thread of 20th century references to the Goodman-Hakewill controversy to understand, historically, how that controversy came to be ‘known’ to us today. This meta-perspective offers a possibility to try and understand some of the truths at stake in the controversy itself that have remained inaccessible up until now.