Abstract During the 17th century, in a new contested tradition known as Theories of the Earth, conventions for the visual representation of the Earth as a whole developed alongside the expression of biblical idiom. Global depictions carried embedded biblical idiom that shaped the formulation of questions, the development of theories, and the exchange of discoveries and ideas. In several examples I contrast the varying ways in which biblical idiom was expressed within global depictions, particularly hexameral idiom (i.e. the language of the six day creation in Genesis 1). I discuss the Jesuit mathematician Gabriele Beati and meteorological and cosmic sections; the cosmogonic sections and hexameral idiom of Robert Fludd; the geogonic sections and hexameral idiom of René Descartes; the apocalyptic idiom of Thomas Burnet; and the global depictions and hexameral idiom of William Whiston in the controversy over Burnet. Biblical and particularly hexameral idiom proved durable and versatile for more than a century after Fludd, and facilitated the development of a directionalist sense of Earth history. The continuities of visual conventions, the durability of hexameral idiom, and the contrasts of disciplinary perspectives and local contexts observed in the examples considered here conform well to the characterization of Theories of the Earth as a contested print tradition.

Abstract The Theories of the Earth formulated by the English scholars Thomas Burnet, William Whiston and John Woodward at the end of the seventeenth century circulated widely within the continent of Europe during the first decades of the eighteenth century. These theories established a sequence of physical conditions of the Earth according to the chronology outlined in the Book of Genesis, emphasizing two main stages: the Creation and the Deluge. Although the authority of the Biblical account of the age and early history of the Earth was normally accepted at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the continental reception of English Theories of the Earth varied. This was due to the complexity of the European context which since the 1660s had produced the theories of René Descartes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Athanasius Kircher, as well as Nicolaus Steno’s dynamic view on the development of the Earth’s surface. Steno emphasized the importance of the interpretation of rock strata in the field for reconstruction of the Earth’s history. He also carefully avoided contradicting the Biblical account and associated the Deluge with one of the geological stages identified in his history. Nevertheless, the Stenonian heritage stimulated some Italian scientists – such as Antonio Vallisneri, Luigi Ferdinando Marsili, and later Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti and Giovanni Arduino – to presuppose, within the results of their researches, an indefinitely great antiquity of the Earth. Theoretical models linked to Biblical chronology included those of Emanuel Swedenborg in Sweden and Johann Jakob Scheuchzer in Switzerland, while in France, Benok De Maillet proposed a Theory of the Earth which was censured by the Church because of its possible implications regarding the eternity of matter. Among European scholars of the first decades of the eighteenth century, the Stenonian heritage (notably the necessity of fieldwork in a regional context) and the global Theories of the Earth were equally influential.

Abstract In 1550 few questioned the ‘biblical’ age of the earth, but by the mid-nineteenth century no educated person accepted it. The change is considered to have been a period of conflict between Christianity and science over the age of the earth. In fact, the conflict was small because from the Reformation era most considered the bible to be accommodated to its culture and that at the beginning of time God created a Chaos, which was re-constituted in ‘six days’. This was put forward by Grotius and Mersenne. then by the Theories of the Earth of Burnet. Whiston and others and then by later writers to allow for geological time. This reached its climax in early nineteenth century Britain with Chalmers. Conybeare and Buckland, thus preventing any major conflict between geology and Genesis. The perceived conflict of these centuries is a matter of retrospective interpretation, which does not do justice to those Christian thinkers, like de Luc, Chalmers and Townsend who accommodated geological time with little conflict, and those like Patrick, Ray and Whiston who opened up the way for this accommodation to geological time in the seventeenth century. The conflict between geology and Genesis is one of retrospective perception rather than historical reality. Only a minority of Christians, as with the anti- or scriptural geologists of the early nineteenth century, considered there to be a conflict.