Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare's England took Kristen Poole over ten years to write, and the apparent ease with which she navigates the complexities of early modern epistemologies and phenomenology simultaneously belies and confirms this depth of scholarship. Indeed, the book itself is premised upon the convergence of concepts seemingly paradoxical, incompatible or separate. Poole seeks to bring together the previously disparate “religious turn” and “spatial turn” of early modern scholarship (219), and, in doing so, reveal and explore the “paradoxical coexistence of . . . antithetical epistemologies” (218), marking the environment of the supernatural and the divine at the turn of the seventeenth century. This ground breaking study manages to achieve this challenging task with remarkable clarity and ingenuity.

Poole identifies the relationship between religious belief and spatial conceptualization, establishing how shifts in these realms were interconnected and mutually constitutive. Analysis of this relationship reveals how an older understanding of the spatial universe—one that was mutable and fluid—was giving way to a newer geometric model, understood as linear and cubic. These were changes interwoven with understandings of the divine universe. The older model was geo-centric, it situated purgatory and hell within the earth, and produced an open spatial fluidity which enabled God and Satan to interact with humanity through their material environment. It adhered to what Poole terms “Ovidian physics,” “in which metamorphosis, rather than “laws,” defined the properties of matter and the space in which it moved” (35). The new imagining of space was heliocentric, questioned the location of hell and disputed the existence of purgatory. Space became closed and mathematical, thus unable to allow for supernatural activity, and rendered void the notion of Satan working through witches and the physical environment. Poole contends that this shift from metamorphic, labile space to geometric, cartographic space was not simply the latter overwriting and eradicating the former, but was a confused, incomplete and hybrid process, resulting in messy negotiation and tension between the two. Poole explores how this tension was dramatized within the early modern theatre.

The book is neatly structured around a series of spaces and the plays in which they feature: that of the demonic contract in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus; the deathbed in Othello; purgatory in Hamlet; the cosmos in Macbeth; and the geographical landscape in The Tempest. Situating these spaces within their wider cultural contexts, Poole provides new and innovative perspectives. For example, in chapter 2, “Scene at the Deathbed: Ars moriendi, Othello and Envisioning the Supernatural” (58–94), she proposes taking into account visual dynamics within the spatial environment as one approach to analysing the supernatural. The bodies of supernatural beings were not necessarily material, or visible to all. Neither did they conform to the laws of geometry, nor participate in what we now understand as a normative field of vision. Therefore, rather than analysis relying on a linear perspective with a common point of accessibility, Poole persuasively argues for an awareness of multiple visual realities within the same spatial field, to allow for encounters with the supernatural.

Poole explores this spatial plurality by engaging with the highly influential tradition of ars moriendi, through which the dying person saw and interacted with demons not seen by the attendants, transforming the bedchamber into a site of eschatological battle. Importantly, Poole reminds us that rather than being delusional, these exchanges were about a real belief in the demonic and the physical presence of demons at the deathbed. She demonstrates how this tradition—highly familiar to an early modern audience—informs the final scenes of Othello. However, this dramatic representation of these multiple modes of perception, Poole argues, makes the ars moriendi tableau unreadable to the play's audience. Poole interprets this confusion through the transitional instability between the older, fluid understandings of space, and the newer geometric model. Each chapter provides similarly nuanced and intelligent readings of this spatial and religious transition, with Poole drawing on sources ranging from the theological writings of Calvin and Hooker to geometry books and surveying manuals.

One of the strengths of Poole's work lies in this subtlety. Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare's England intermeshes the spatial and the religious in fascinating ways: through the recorded words of Moriens during their demonic conflict in the bedchamber; the cartographic, topographical and purgatorial representation of Iceland's Mount Hecla; the divine significance of the triangle or the instruments of surveying. Furthermore, Poole raises methodological questions regarding scholarship of the supernatural, encapsulated in the question “how do we take the devil seriously?” (25). She notes that scholarship has tended to be more comfortable with emerging modern voices of skepticism and disbelief rather than those within the tricky area of magic and belief. In response, a key aspect of this book is Poole's exploration of a methodology able to examine the supernatural as a real, rational presence, and concerned with the experience of living inside supernatural epistemologies and beliefs at a time when the devil and God were as real as each other.

Unquestionably an original and valuable contribution to early modern studies, Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare's England is academically rich, yet refreshingly accessible, and is of interest across a variety of disciplines and specialisms. Significantly, Poole's assertion of both the centrality of the supernatural in addition to the divine, and the need to re-examine our approaches to the “un-visible” (62) during this period, opens up important spaces for new scholarly perspectives.