C.S. Lewis, Thomas Derrick, and Screwtape

Six hitherto unpublished letters and a poetic postcard represent C.S. Lewis’s side of a correspondence in the early 1940s with the artist and illustrator Thomas Derrick. The letters discuss the possibility, which was never realised, of an illustrated edition of The Screwtape Letters and intriguingly indicate that Lewis and the artist discussed other collaborative possibilities, most notably a project on the virtues and the vices, also sadly unrealised. Lewis sent Derrick an early sketch of Screwtape.

Wonderful Works of Nature: C.S. Lewis and Reijer Hooykaas on Francis Bacon and the Scientific Revolution

This article examines a disagreement which briefly came to light decades ago, half-posthumously, between two twentieth-century Christian scholars, C.S. Lewis (1898–1963) and Reijer Hooykaas (1906–1994), the first Dutch professor in the history of science, who later succeeded to the chair of Eduard Dijksterhuis in Utrecht. Hooykaas and Lewis diverge in their views of the role traditionally ascribed to the work of Francis Bacon (1561–1626) as a major inspiration for the seventeenth-century scientific revolution. Put briefly, while Bacon is a hero for Hooykaas, he is an antihero for Lewis. Sorting out the extent to which either scholar was right not only results in a fairly clear answer but entails, as a bonus, a fine example of what the history of science as an academic discipline is indeed good for.