This illuminating account of ideas of world order prevalent in the Elizabethan Age and later is an indispensable companion for readers of the great writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists, Donne and Milton, among many others. The basic medieval idea of an ordered Chain of Being is studied by Tillyard in the process of its various transformations by the dynamic spirit of the Renaissance. Among his topics are: Angels; the Stars and Fortune; the Analogy between Macrocosm and Microcosm; the Four Elements; the Four Humors; Sympathies;...