Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity – serie

Few English books are as widely known, underread, and underappreciated as Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. Stephanie Shirilan laments that modern scholars often treat the Anatomy as an unmediated repository of early modern views on melancholy, overlooking the fact that Burton is writing a cento - an ancient form of satire that quotes and misquotes authoritative texts in often subversive ways - and that his express intent in so doing is to offer his readers literary therapy for melancholy. This book explores the ways in which the Anatomy dispenses both direct physic and more systemic medicine by encouraging readers to think of melancholy as a privileged mental and spiritual acuity that requires cultivation and management rather than cure. Refuting the prevailing historiography of anxious early modern embodiment that cites Burton as a key witness, Shirilan submits that the Anatomy rejects contemporary Neostoic and Puritan approaches to melancholy. She reads Burton’s erraticism, opacity, and theatricality as modes of resistance against demands for constancy, transparency, and plainness in the popular literature of spiritual and moral hygiene of his day. She shows how Burton draws on rhetorical, theological, and philosophical traditions that privilege the transformative powers of the imagination in order to celebrate melancholic impressionability for its capacity to inspire and engender empathy, charity, and faith.

Giordano Bruno and the Geometry of Language brings to the fore a sixteenth-century philosopher's role in early modern Europe as a bridge between science and literature, or more specifically, between the spatial paradigm of geometry and that of language. Arielle Saiber examines how, to invite what Bruno believed to be an infinite universe-its qualities and vicissitudes-into the world of language, Bruno forged a system of 'figurative' vocabularies: number, form, space, and word. This verbal and symbolic system in which geometric figures are seen to underlie rhetorical figures, is what Saiber calls 'geometric rhetoric.' Through analysis of Bruno's writings, Saiber shows how Bruno's writing necessitates a crafting of space, and is, in essence, a lexicon of spatial concepts. This study constitutes an original contribution both to scholarship on Bruno and to the fields of early modern scientific and literary studies. It also addresses the broader question of what role geometry has in the formation of any language and literature of any place and time.

Hillary M. Nunn here traces the connections between the London public's interest in medical dissection and the changing cultural significance of bloodshed on the early Stuart playhouse stage. Considering the playhouses' role within the social world of early modern London, Nunn explores the influence of public dissection upon the presentation of human bodies in well-known plays such as King Lear, as well as in a wide range of often neglected early Stuart tragedies like The Second Maiden's Tragedy and Revenge for Honour. In addition to dramatic texts, the study draws heavily on anatomy treatises and popular pamphlets of the time. Incorporating views of anatomy's significance from a wide range of sources, this study shows the ways in which early Stuart dramatists called upon Londoners' increasing fascination with anatomical dissection to shape the staging of their tragedies.

This collection of essays makes an important contribution to scholarship by examining how the myths and practices of medical knowledge were interwoven into popular entertainment on the early modern stage. Rather than treating medicine, the theater, and literary texts separately, the contributors show how the anxieties engendered by medical socio-scientific investigations were translated from the realm of medicine to the stage by Renaissance playwrights, especially Shakespeare. As a whole, the volume reconsiders typical ways of viewing medical theory and practice while individual essays focus on gender and ethnicity, theatrical impersonation, medical counterfeit and malfeasance, and medicine as it appears in the form of various political metaphors.

Between 1540 and 1654, The Byrth of Mankynde was a huge commercial success. Offering information on fertility, pregnancy, birth, and infant care, and written in a chatty, colloquial style, it influenced most other literary works of the period bearing on sex, reproduction, and childcare. Until now, this important text has been unavailable except for a microfilm of the 1654 edition. For this new annotated edition of the 1560 version, Elaine Hobby has modernized the spelling and included informative notes. In her critical introduction, she not only traces the development of the book from its German origins, but also shows how early-modern ideas about the reproductive process combined ancient, medieval, and contemporary conceptions. Combining editorial rigour with a concern for the needs of the informed non-specialist, Hobby has made available a text that will be useful to scholars and students in a range of academic disciplines, including literature, history, and women's studies.

This edition provides the first complete, modern version of John Norden's The Surveyor's Dialogue. Norden's text, a series of dialogues between a fictional surveyor and several interlocutors”including a tenant farmer, an aristocrat landowner, a manorial officer, and a socially mobile land buyer”is remarkable for its unique commentary on the agrarian roots of English capitalism. In his extensive introduction, Mark Netzloff situates the text in relation to a number of early modern contexts. He discusses the use of dialogue and other literary forms in proto-scientific writing and the role of print in the increasing professionalism of early surveyors. Netzloff also examines the impact of capital formation on agrarian and manorial class relations, discussing topics such as popular protest and revolt, cottagers and the rural poor, regionalism and urbanization, and the transformation of the natural environment through deforestation, enclosure, and the appropriation of commons. Alongside a thorough annotation of technical and historical terms, the edition provides a list of textual variants among early modern versions of the text. This critical edition of The Surveyor's Dialogue constitutes an important contribution to early modern scholarship, and it will be invaluable to scholars from a range of fields, including the history of science, economic and agrarian history, and literary and cultural studies.

Commemorating the 400th anniversary of the publication of Francis Bacon's Advancement of Learning (1605), this collection examines Bacon's recasting of proto-scientific philosophies and practices into early modern discourses of knowledge. Like Bacon, all of the contributors to this volume confront an essential question: how to integrate intellectual traditions with emergent knowledges to forge new intellectual futures. The volume's main theme is Bacon's core interest in identifying and conceptualizing coherent intellectual disciplines, including the central question of whether Bacon succeeded in creating unified discourses about learning. Bacon's interests in natural philosophy, politics, ethics, law, medicine, religion, neoplatonic magic, technology and humanistic learning are here mirrored in the contributors' varied intellectual backgrounds and diverse approaches to Bacon's thought.

Gerhild Scholz Williams's Ways of Knowing in Early Modern Germany: Johannes Praetorius as a Witness to His Time, reviews key discourses in eight of Praetorius's works. She introduces the modern reader to the kinds of subjects, the intellectual and spiritual approaches to them, and the genres that this educated and productive German scholar and polymath presented to his audience in the seventeenth century. By relating these individual works to a number of contemporaneous writings, Williams shows how Praetorius constructed a panorama in print in which wonders, the occult, the emerging scientific way of thinking, family and social mores are recurrent themes. Included in Praetorius's portrait of the mid-seventeenth-century are discussions of Paracelsus's scientific theories and practice; early modern German theories on witchcraft and demonology and their applications in the seventeenth century. Furthermore, we read about the early modern beginnings of ethnography, anthropology, and physical geography; gender theory, early modern and contemporary notions of intellectual property, and competing and sometimes conflicting early modern scientific and theological explanations of natural anomalies. Moreover, throughout his work and certainly in those texts chosen for this study, Praetorius appears before us as an assiduous reporter of contemporary European and pan-European events and scientific discoveries, a critic of common superstitions, as much a believer in occult causes and signs and in God's communication with His people. In his writings, in his way of telling, he offers strategies by which to comprehend the political, social, and intellectual uncertainties of his century and, in so doing, identifies ways to confront the diverse interpretive authorities and the varieties of structures of knowledge that interacted and conflicted with each other in the public arena of knowing.

When Planetomachia was published in 1585, Greene himself-always the best advertiser of his own books-promised his readers a perfectly balanced diet of edification and entertainment. He described his newest offering as an astronomical discourse on the nature and influence of the planets interlaced with 'pleasant and tragical histories,' which one could ostensibly use as a manual to identify various planetary influences on 'natural constitution.' In this first complete critical edition, Nandini Das presents Planetomachia as a complex hybrid which is eminently a product of its times, exploring how the two very different intellectual and cultural spheres of Humanist scholarship and Renaissance popular print engage in an intriguing, albeit uneasy, dialogue to produce this unique work of prose fiction. The volume gives a clear sense, afforded by no other existing edition, of the intellectual climate which shaped this text. It offers substantial introductory material (on biographical, literary and scientific contexts) and extensive annotation identifying Greene's allusions and elucidating his vocabulary. It also includes translations and extracts from significant sources, along with a bibliography of relevant primary texts and critical work on Greene generally and on Planetomachia in particular.

Kevin Killeen addresses one of the most enigmatic of seventeenth century writers, Thomas Browne (1605-1682), whose voracious intellectual pursuits provide an unparalleled insight into how early modern scholarly culture understood the relations between its disciplines. Browne's work encompasses biblical commentary, historiography, natural history, classical philology, artistic propriety and an encyclopaedic coverage of natural philosophy. This book traces the intellectual climate in which such disparate interests could cohere, locating Browne within the cultural and political matrices of his time. While Browne is most frequently remembered for the magnificence of his prose and his temperamental poise, qualities that knit well with the picture of a detached, apolitical figure, this work argues that Browne's significance emerges most fully in the context of contemporary battles over interpretative authority, within the intricately linked fields of biblical exegesis, scientific thought, and politics. Killeen's work centres on a reassessment of the scope and importance of Browne's most elaborate text, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, his vast encyclopaedia of error with its mazy series of investigations and through this explores the multivalent nature of early-modern enquiry.

These essays throw new light on the complex relations between science, literature and rhetoric as avenues to discovery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds examine the agency of early modern poets, playwrights, essayists, philosophers, natural philosophers and artists in remaking their culture and reforming ideas about human understanding. Analyzing the ways in which the works of such diverse writers as Shakespeare, Bacon, Hobbes, Milton, Cavendish, Boyle, Pope and Behn related to contemporary epistemological debates, these essays move us toward a better understanding of interactions between the sciences and the humanities during a seminal phase in the emergence of modern Western thought.

The focus of this study is the perception of nature in the language of poetry and the languages of natural philosophy, technology, theology, and global exploration, primarily in seventeenth-century England. Its premise is that language and the perception of nature vitally affect each other and that seventeenth-century poets, primarily John Milton, Andrew Marvell, and Henry Vaughan, but also Margaret Cavendish, Thomas Traherne, Anne Finch, and others, responded to experimental proto-science and new technology in ways that we now call 'ecological' - concerned with watersheds and habitats and the lives of all creatures. It provides close readings of works by these poets in the contexts of natural history, philosophy, and theology as well as technology and land use, showing how they responded to what are currently considered ecological issues: deforestation, mining, air pollution, drainage of wetlands, destruction of habitats, the sentience and intelligence of animals, overbuilding, global commerce, the politics of land use, and relations between social justice and justice towards the other-than-human world. In this important book, Diane McColley demonstrates the language of poetry, the language of responsible science, and the language of moral and political philosophy all to be necessary parts of public discourse.

Scientific modernity treats interpretation as a matter of discovery. Discovery, however, may not be all that matters about interpretation. In Milton's Secrecy, J. D. Fleming argues that the poetry and prose of John Milton (1608-1674) are about the presentation of a radically different hermeneutic model. This is based on openness within language, rather than on secrets within the world. Milton's representations of meaning are exoteric, not esoteric; recognitive, not inventive. Milton's Secrecy places its titular subject in opposition to the epistemology of modern natural science, and to the interpretative assumptions that science supports. At the same time, the book places Milton within early modern contexts of interpretation and knowledge. Drawing on Renaissance Neoplatonism, Tudor-Stuart ideology, and the Calvinist theory of conscience, Milton's Secrecy argues that the attempt to theorize interpretation without discovery is not unorthodox within early modern English culture. If anything, Milton's hostility to secrecy and discovery aligns him with his culture's ethical and hermeneutic ideal. Milton's Secrecy provides an historical framework for considering the theoretical validity of this ideal, by aligning it with the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer.

Contemplating the textual gardens, poetic garlands, and epigrammatic groves which dot the landscape of early modern English print, Leah Knight exposes and analyzes the close configuration of plants and writing in the period. She argues that the early modern cultures and cultivation of plants and books depended on each other in historically specific and novel ways that yielded a profusion of linguistic, conceptual, metaphorical, and material intersections. Examining both poetic and botanical texts, as well as the poetics of botanical texts, this study focuses on the two outstanding English botanical writers of the sixteenth century, William Turner and John Gerard, to suggest the unexpected historical relationship between literature and science in the early modern genre of the herbal. In-depth readings of their work are situated amid chapters that establish the broader context for the interpenetration of plants and writing in the period's cultural practices in order to illuminate a complex interplay between materials and discourses rarely considered in tandem today.

The first study to analyze print vernacular folio herbals from the standpoint of gender and to present original findings to do with early modern women's ownership of these herbals, Medical Authority and Englishwomen's Herbal Texts also looks at reasons and contexts behind early modern female writers claiming herbal practice. Author Rebecca Laroche first establishes cultural backdrops in the gendering of medical authority that takes place in the herbals and the regular ownership of these herbals by women. She then examines women's engagements with herbal texts in life writings and poetry and asks how these moments represent and engage medical authority. In ultimately demonstrating how female writers variously take on women's herbal medical practices, Laroche reveals the broad range of literary potentials within the historical category of women's medicine.

The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature features original essays exploring the automaton-from animated statue to anthropomorphized machine-in the poetry, prose, and drama of England in the 16th and 17th centuries. Addressing the history and significance of the living machine in early modern literature, the collection places literary automata of the period within their larger aesthetic, historical, philosophical, and scientific contexts. While no single theory or perspective conscribes the volume, taken as a whole the collection helps correct an assumption that frequently emerges from a post-Enlightenment perspective: that these animated beings are by definition exemplars of the new science, or that they point necessarily to man's triumphant relationship to technology. On the contrary, automata in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seem only partly and sporadically to function as embodiments of an emerging mechanistic or materialist worldview. Renaissance automata were just as likely not to confirm for viewers a hypothesis about the man-machine. Instead, these essays show, automata were often a source of wonder, suggestive of magic, proof of the uncannily animating effect of poetry-indeed, just as likely to unsettle the divide between man and divinity as that between man and matter.

This edition provides the first complete, modern version of John Norden's The Surveyor's Dialogue. Norden's text, a series of dialogues between a fictional surveyor and several interlocutors”including a tenant farmer, an aristocrat landowner, a manorial officer, and a socially mobile land buyer”is remarkable for its unique commentary on the agrarian roots of English capitalism. In his extensive introduction, Mark Netzloff situates the text in relation to a number of early modern contexts. He discusses the use of dialogue and other literary forms in proto-scientific writing and the role of print in the increasing professionalism of early surveyors. Netzloff also examines the impact of capital formation on agrarian and manorial class relations, discussing topics such as popular protest and revolt, cottagers and the rural poor, regionalism and urbanization, and the transformation of the natural environment through deforestation, enclosure, and the appropriation of commons. Alongside a thorough annotation of technical and historical terms, the edition provides a list of textual variants among early modern versions of the text. This critical edition of The Surveyor's Dialogue constitutes an important contribution to early modern scholarship, and it will be invaluable to scholars from a range of fields, including the history of science, economic and agrarian history, and literary and cultural studies.

This collection of essays makes an important contribution to scholarship by examining how the myths and practices of medical knowledge were interwoven into popular entertainment on the early modern stage. Rather than treating medicine, the theater, and literary texts separately, the contributors show how the anxieties engendered by medical socio-scientific investigations were translated from the realm of medicine to the stage by Renaissance playwrights, especially Shakespeare. As a whole, the volume reconsiders typical ways of viewing medical theory and practice while individual essays focus on gender and ethnicity, theatrical impersonation, medical counterfeit and malfeasance, and medicine as it appears in the form of various political metaphors.

Anamorphosis in Early Modern Literature explores the prevalence of anamorphic perspective in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England. Jen Boyle investigates how anamorphic media flourished in early modern England as an interactive technology and mode of affect in public interactive art, city and garden design, and as a theory and figure in literature, political theory and natural and experimental philosophy. Anamorphic mediation, Boyle brings to light, provided Milton, Margaret Cavendish, and Daniel Defoe, among others, with a powerful techno-imaginary for traversing through projective, virtual experience. Drawing on extensive archival research related to the genre of "practical perspective" in early modern Europe, Boyle offers a scholarly consideration of anamorphic perspective (its technical means, performances, and embodied practices) as an interactive aesthetics and cultural imaginary. Ultimately, Boyle demonstrates how perspective media inflected a diverse set of knowledges and performances related to embodiment, affect, and collective consciousness.

The first study to analyze print vernacular folio herbals from the standpoint of gender and to present original findings to do with early modern women's ownership of these herbals, Medical Authority and Englishwomen's Herbal Texts also looks at reasons and contexts behind early modern female writers claiming herbal practice. Author Rebecca Laroche first establishes cultural backdrops in the gendering of medical authority that takes place in the herbals and the regular ownership of these herbals by women. She then examines women's engagements with herbal texts in life writings and poetry and asks how these moments represent and engage medical authority. In ultimately demonstrating how female writers variously take on women's herbal medical practices, Laroche reveals the broad range of literary potentials within the historical category of women's medicine.

The focus of this study is the perception of nature in the language of poetry and the languages of natural philosophy, technology, theology, and global exploration, primarily in seventeenth-century England. Its premise is that language and the perception of nature vitally affect each other and that seventeenth-century poets, primarily John Milton, Andrew Marvell, and Henry Vaughan, but also Margaret Cavendish, Thomas Traherne, Anne Finch, and others, responded to experimental proto-science and new technology in ways that we now call 'ecological' - concerned with watersheds and habitats and the lives of all creatures. It provides close readings of works by these poets in the contexts of natural history, philosophy, and theology as well as technology and land use, showing how they responded to what are currently considered ecological issues: deforestation, mining, air pollution, drainage of wetlands, destruction of habitats, the sentience and intelligence of animals, overbuilding, global commerce, the politics of land use, and relations between social justice and justice towards the other-than-human world. In this important book, Diane McColley demonstrates the language of poetry, the language of responsible science, and the language of moral and political philosophy all to be necessary parts of public discourse.

Kevin Killeen addresses one of the most enigmatic of seventeenth century writers, Thomas Browne (1605-1682), whose voracious intellectual pursuits provide an unparalleled insight into how early modern scholarly culture understood the relations between its disciplines. Browne's work encompasses biblical commentary, historiography, natural history, classical philology, artistic propriety and an encyclopaedic coverage of natural philosophy. This book traces the intellectual climate in which such disparate interests could cohere, locating Browne within the cultural and political matrices of his time. While Browne is most frequently remembered for the magnificence of his prose and his temperamental poise, qualities that knit well with the picture of a detached, apolitical figure, this work argues that Browne's significance emerges most fully in the context of contemporary battles over interpretative authority, within the intricately linked fields of biblical exegesis, scientific thought, and politics. Killeen's work centres on a reassessment of the scope and importance of Browne's most elaborate text, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, his vast encyclopaedia of error with its mazy series of investigations and through this explores the multivalent nature of early-modern enquiry.

Scientific modernity treats interpretation as a matter of discovery. Discovery, however, may not be all that matters about interpretation. In Milton's Secrecy, J. D. Fleming argues that the poetry and prose of John Milton (1608-1674) are about the presentation of a radically different hermeneutic model. This is based on openness within language, rather than on secrets within the world. Milton's representations of meaning are exoteric, not esoteric; recognitive, not inventive. Milton's Secrecy places its titular subject in opposition to the epistemology of modern natural science, and to the interpretative assumptions that science supports. At the same time, the book places Milton within early modern contexts of interpretation and knowledge. Drawing on Renaissance Neoplatonism, Tudor-Stuart ideology, and the Calvinist theory of conscience, Milton's Secrecy argues that the attempt to theorize interpretation without discovery is not unorthodox within early modern English culture. If anything, Milton's hostility to secrecy and discovery aligns him with his culture's ethical and hermeneutic ideal. Milton's Secrecy provides an historical framework for considering the theoretical validity of this ideal, by aligning it with the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer.

The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature features original essays exploring the automaton-from animated statue to anthropomorphized machine-in the poetry, prose, and drama of England in the 16th and 17th centuries. Addressing the history and significance of the living machine in early modern literature, the collection places literary automata of the period within their larger aesthetic, historical, philosophical, and scientific contexts. While no single theory or perspective conscribes the volume, taken as a whole the collection helps correct an assumption that frequently emerges from a post-Enlightenment perspective: that these animated beings are by definition exemplars of the new science, or that they point necessarily to man's triumphant relationship to technology. On the contrary, automata in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seem only partly and sporadically to function as embodiments of an emerging mechanistic or materialist worldview. Renaissance automata were just as likely not to confirm for viewers a hypothesis about the man-machine. Instead, these essays show, automata were often a source of wonder, suggestive of magic, proof of the uncannily animating effect of poetry-indeed, just as likely to unsettle the divide between man and divinity as that between man and matter.

Hillary M. Nunn here traces the connections between the London public's interest in medical dissection and the changing cultural significance of bloodshed on the early Stuart playhouse stage. Considering the playhouses' role within the social world of early modern London, Nunn explores the influence of public dissection upon the presentation of human bodies in well-known plays such as King Lear, as well as in a wide range of often neglected early Stuart tragedies like The Second Maiden's Tragedy and Revenge for Honour. In addition to dramatic texts, the study draws heavily on anatomy treatises and popular pamphlets of the time. Incorporating views of anatomy's significance from a wide range of sources, this study shows the ways in which early Stuart dramatists called upon Londoners' increasing fascination with anatomical dissection to shape the staging of their tragedies.

These essays throw new light on the complex relations between science, literature and rhetoric as avenues to discovery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds examine the agency of early modern poets, playwrights, essayists, philosophers, natural philosophers and artists in remaking their culture and reforming ideas about human understanding. Analyzing the ways in which the works of such diverse writers as Shakespeare, Bacon, Hobbes, Milton, Cavendish, Boyle, Pope and Behn related to contemporary epistemological debates, these essays move us toward a better understanding of interactions between the sciences and the humanities during a seminal phase in the emergence of modern Western thought.

Contemplating the textual gardens, poetic garlands, and epigrammatic groves which dot the landscape of early modern English print, Leah Knight exposes and analyzes the close configuration of plants and writing in the period. She argues that the early modern cultures and cultivation of plants and books depended on each other in historically specific and novel ways that yielded a profusion of linguistic, conceptual, metaphorical, and material intersections. Examining both poetic and botanical texts, as well as the poetics of botanical texts, this study focuses on the two outstanding English botanical writers of the sixteenth century, William Turner and John Gerard, to suggest the unexpected historical relationship between literature and science in the early modern genre of the herbal. In-depth readings of their work are situated amid chapters that establish the broader context for the interpenetration of plants and writing in the period's cultural practices in order to illuminate a complex interplay between materials and discourses rarely considered in tandem today.

Commemorating the 400th anniversary of the publication of Francis Bacon's Advancement of Learning (1605), this collection examines Bacon's recasting of proto-scientific philosophies and practices into early modern discourses of knowledge. Like Bacon, all of the contributors to this volume confront an essential question: how to integrate intellectual traditions with emergent knowledges to forge new intellectual futures. The volume's main theme is Bacon's core interest in identifying and conceptualizing coherent intellectual disciplines, including the central question of whether Bacon succeeded in creating unified discourses about learning. Bacon's interests in natural philosophy, politics, ethics, law, medicine, religion, neoplatonic magic, technology and humanistic learning are here mirrored in the contributors' varied intellectual backgrounds and diverse approaches to Bacon's thought.

Anamorphosis in Early Modern Literature explores the prevalence of anamorphic perspective in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England. Jen Boyle investigates how anamorphic media flourished in early modern England as an interactive technology and mode of affect in public interactive art, city and garden design, and as a theory and figure in literature, political theory and natural and experimental philosophy. Anamorphic mediation, Boyle brings to light, provided Milton, Margaret Cavendish, and Daniel Defoe, among others, with a powerful techno-imaginary for traversing through projective, virtual experience. Drawing on extensive archival research related to the genre of "practical perspective" in early modern Europe, Boyle offers a scholarly consideration of anamorphic perspective (its technical means, performances, and embodied practices) as an interactive aesthetics and cultural imaginary. Ultimately, Boyle demonstrates how perspective media inflected a diverse set of knowledges and performances related to embodiment, affect, and collective consciousness.