Adam Nicolson explores the 17th century's contradictory attitudes towards the nature of reality. While a puritan struggled to accept God's will, an early naturalist accepted nothing without testing it first. How did God work? How did the world work? What was our place within it? These questions overflow from the era's diaries and notebooks, famous and unknown alike. Curiouser and curiouser, spreading literacy allowed explosive ideas not just to be recorded but shared, as Adam reveals the texts that rewrote our world