William Poole's book sets out to introduce its readers ‘to a series of closely connected intellectual debates that took place in seventeenth-century England’ (p. 1) concerning the history of the Earth and its inhabitants. At the centre of Poole's subject matter are several works that have proven perennially interesting to scholars – the ‘earth theories’ written by Thomas Burnet, John Woodward and William Whiston during the late seventeenth century. The ‘world makers’ of the book's title, these men wrote compelling accounts of the past and future of the earth that explicitly attempt to square scripture's history of and prophecy for the Earth with more or less modern physical explanations for its past, present and future forms. In his Telluris Theoria Sacra (1680), for example, Burnet argued both that the biblical deluge was inflicted on the Earth by God as a punishment for man's sinfulness, and that it had definite physical causes that can be described by resort to Cartesian physics. For seventeenth-century readers and writers alike, as Poole forcefully argues, it made sense that natural-philosophical arguments about the form of the Earth should cohere with the scriptural account, which was taken to be both an authoritative and generally literal account of the changes that the Earth has undergone and will undergo.

The works of the world makers are wonderfully compelling; they have provided materials for books about the relations between science and religion, as well as histories of aesthetics, geology and scientific ideas about time. Nevertheless, they are still generally characterized as oddities of Restoration and Augustan science. Works like Burnet's Telluris Theoria Sacra, it has been supposed, provide evidence for a growing divide between religion and science by virtue of their apparent failure to successfully reconcile scripture history with natural philosophy. Yet this claim rests on a disciplinary anachronism; the earth theories only look unusual if it is assumed that science and scriptural criticism were otherwise becoming mutually exclusive discourses by the end of the seventeenth century. In the World Makers, Poole offers a much-needed correction to this anachronism. By placing the earth theories in their own intellectual setting he shows us that they are not oddities, but are in fact suggestive of many of the problems that interested some of the most important English natural philosophers in the period between 1660 and 1700.

Poole is therefore correct to devote what at first glance might seem very little space to the works of the ‘world makers’ themselves. Instead, he shows that many of the philosophers attached to the Royal Society who find their way into mainstream accounts of the history of science – such as William Harvey, Robert Hooke, John Wilkins and John Ray – were motivated in many inquiries by a similar concern for the Earth's history as it can be accounted for both in scripture and by physical explanations. Poole's concern to avoid anachronism is evident in the organization of The World Makers. Not only is he careful to lay out the strata of the relevant areas of discourse, but he arranges much of the book so that the chapters reflect the main problems for earth history thrown up by events in the Bible (such as the Creation, the Flood, Babel and the Conflagration).

Of even more fundamental importance, however, is the author's sensitivity to the intellectual practices of the day. Two areas stand out. First, he has very industriously mined archival sources for contemporary responses to speculations about the Earth's form. Second, he has a great feel for the nature of contemporary apologetic writing. Poole shows that many of the early Royal Society's members engaged themselves deeply both with criticism of the Bible and with writings of an apologetic nature designed to show the conformity of scripture with natural philosophy. Yet the prevailing apologetic style often required authors to stack up every conceivable opposing argument, or even to construct new arguments of an ‘atheist’ stripe, in order to refute them. Heterodoxy, therefore, haunted texts written with very innocent, orthodox aims. The World Makers shows that we can find tensions in the seventeenth-century use of natural philosophy to resolve questions posed by scripture history, but that these tensions are not to be found in a simple contrasting of ‘science’ with ‘theology’. Rather, such tensions often emerged from within the domain of scriptural criticism itself, or from the intellectual practices of men who were not capable of construing natural philosophy and theology as mutually exclusive discourses.

One might expect such a well-researched work of scholarship to be robustly argued, but The World Makers is in fact very sparing in its use of argumentation. The introduction is very thin, and does little to situate the work in historiographical or theoretical terms. Moreover, the absence of firm statements of the work's argument leaves it lacking in momentum, especially in some of its middle chapters. Indeed, the links between chapters often consist simply of statements of intent, rather than justifications for the importance of the material presented to any particular argument or claim. Finally, Poole hardly takes up the opportunity presented by the conclusion to show us what his arguments do to the historiography that they contribute to. It is almost as if the author expects that his material, once dug out of the archives and well presented, will speak for itself and prove valuable without too much explanation. Yet this constitutes a theoretical position about the nature of history that requires, at the very least, justification.

These criticisms notwithstanding, The World Makers is a very fine work of intellectual history, and the first to explain the ‘earth theories’ in a satisfying way and adequately to situate them in their intellectual world.