John Rogers here addresses the literary and ideological consequences of the remarkable, if improbable, alliance between science and politics in seventeenth-century England. He looks at the cultural intersection between the English and Scientific Revolutions, concentrating on a body of work created in a brief but potent burst of intellectual activity during the period of the Civil Wars, the Interregnum, and the earliest years of the Stuart Restoration. Rogers traces the broad implications of a seemingly outlandish cultural phenomenon: the intellectual imperative to forge an ontological connection between physical motion and political action.

Prizes

Winner of Winner of the James Holly Hanford Book Award (Milt.

An important book... Rogers draws a vivid picture of an intellectual movement with implications that cut across the ideological spectrum, and he offers an ingenious account of how those implications were worked out... Students of the intersections of poetry, politics, and science cannot afford to miss this book.

Rogers, who moves easily between obscure scientific treatise and the poetry of Milton and Marvell, shows how thinking about physical motion—the relation between objects and systems—was enmeshed with thinking about political action, and suggests that the Vitalist Moment helped spawn what would become political liberalism.

This is one of the most original and prospectively seminal studies to date of a particular era, the brief period between 1649 and 1666, the so-called 'Vitalist Moment,' which encompasses the English civil wars, the interregnum, and the onset of the Stuart Restoration.... Rogers is always decorous, deeply insightful, cogent, and lucid. The deeper value of this book... derives from its astute analysis of an intellectual climate. Intellectual history at its best. Most highly recommended.

John Rogers is Associate Professor of English at Yale University.