Eilidh Catherine Dunlop

About Eilidh’s Research:

Although belief in angels is often assumed to have waned after the Protestant Reformation, early modern poets continued to find in these beings a means of exploring what it means to know, perceive, and think. This project examines how post-Reformation poetry represents angelic embodiment and cognition, and how these representations engage with the emerging empirical and rational epistemologies of the seventeenth century. It asks what insights such portrayals provide into the intersections of religious belief, literary expression, and scientific thought in this period.

By tracing changing depictions of angelic consciousness across metaphysical poetry, the writings of the Cambridge Platonists, and the new science of the Royal Society, the project investigates how poets and thinkers used angels to model and test ideas about human cognition. It situates these literary experiments within broader intellectual contexts of theology, natural philosophy, and epistemology, showing how poetic forms contributed to debates about what counts as legitimate knowledge and how it may be acquired.

In doing so, the project demonstrates the enduring value of poetic thinking for understanding how knowledge is made, mediated, and embodied.