ABSTRACT
Sir Kenelm Digby invests a profound degree of psychic energy in palingenesis, so much so that it becomes the conduit for a very real, if metaphorical, return of the dead Venetia. Palingenesis is not a figure of speech for Digby: it is a scientific fact. And while he believes he writes of objective scientific phenomena, in reality he moves into the poetic realm of metalepsis. While his scientific work is grounded in an Aristotelian and even Cartesian sensibility, Digby reveals himself in the letters and Loose Fantasies as imbued with the spirit and aesthetics of Christian Neoplatonism, evidence of a truly impressive intellectual ambidextrousness. Digby's period of Catholic apologetic activity, then, can be read as a therapeutic discourse in which he sought to appease the ghosts of his Catholic father and wife while defining his more immediate concerns for religious assurance and at the same time defining for himself his own relationship to a more Holy Ghost.
