marchitello on science and literature

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Science Studies and English RenaissanceLiteratureHoward MarchitelloTexas A&M University

AbstractThe study of early modern science has been a topic of serious interest to literaryscholars since at least the 1920s. This essay examines the history of this interest andthe critical work it has engendered. In its first wave, this criticism was especiallydevoted to the study of the ways in which early modern science influenced andwas thereby reflected in imaginative writing of the period. This understandingwas itself underwritten by prevailing notions of science as both an autonomous anda privileged discourse governed by an irresistible and ever-evolving rationalism thatstaked exclusive claims to truth. Recent work in the expanding fields of sciencestudies over the past twenty years, however, has served to dislodge this scientificexceptionalism and radically to recast both the history of science and our understanding of the nature of science. As a result, in second wave criticism of earlymodern science and literature, literary culture is no longer believed to exist in amerely reflective relation to the disciplines of science; instead, science and literatureare set in a creative dialectic with each other that denies priority and scientism andhelps to offer a more powerful understanding of the dynamic between these twocomplexly related cultural practices.

In conventional histories of science, particularly of the English traditionwithin which the Renaissance is often figured as the pivotal moment, therehas long been the desire to discover the origin of modern science, that moreor less generally identifiable point in time after which science is imaginedto be so thoroughly autonomous of nature (its normative object of investigation)and culture (its proper background) that both effectively fall away, or at leastinto clearly subordinated positions that do not trouble what is sketched asthe inevitable progress of science across time. Such origins as are identifiedcan take a number of forms and locations: in the break from hermeticism,for example, evident in the unique work of such transitional figures asParacelsus or, later, John Dee; or this origin is found abiding in the recoveryof classical learning and the flowering of humanism; or, within the critiqueof Aristotelian physics. 1 In still other ways the figure of Francis Bacon isoften cited as transformative, particularly for his part in the development of the scientific method so richly on display in the Novum Organum and SylvaSylvarum.2 But rather than consider these narratives of origin, let us remind

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ourselves of the social embeddedness of what emerges as early modernscience. In other words, the desire for finding the point of origin is doomedto fail since it is always on the look out for the first appearance of scienceagainst a background of the rest of the culture. Instead, if we set aside the

desire for discovering origins and look rather for the emergence of whatwill become science, if we collapse foreground and background intosomething like a perpetual middle ground, we are more likely to realize our goal of discerning the emergence of science. To this end, I would like tobegin with Bacon, but with a perhaps less than conventional text in mind:his brief theatrical entertainment, A Device for the Grays Inn Revelssince, as I will argue, it is a text that can serve to demonstrate the historicallyand socially contingent nature of early modern science.

Performed during the 1594 95 Christmas festivities at Grays Inn, one

of the four famous Inns of Court, this text offers a highly stylized rehearsalof the scene of counselors tendering advice to the monarch. 3 In Bacons textthere are six counselors, each of whom offers a particular pursuit as the mostnoble for their sovereign to follow. The second counselor, who argues for the Study of Philosophy and functions effectively as Bacons spokesperson,wish[es] unto your Highness the Exercise of the best and purest part of theMind, and the most innocent and meriting Request, being the Conquestof the Works of Nature ( Gesta Grayorum 34). By this path, the counselor continues, and as a result of bend[ing] the Excellency of your Spirits to the

searching out, inventing and discovering of all whatsoever is hid in secretin the World, the pr ince will be not as a Lamp that shineth to others, and

yet seeth not it self; but as the Eye of the World, that both carrieth and usethLight (34). In order better to achieve this goal, the counselor proposes tothe prince four principal Works and Monuments of your self. The firstof these is The collecting of a most perfect and general Library. Thesecond is a spacious, wonderful Garden. The third: A goodly hugeCabinet, which we would today call a museum. And the fourth Sucha still-house so furnished with Mills, Instruments, Furnaces and Vessels, asmay be a Palace fit for a Philosophers Stone we would perhaps call alaboratory (34 5). It would be through the helps of these Works andMonuments that the new philosopher-prince would realize the conquestof nature predicted at the outset of the second counselors speech:

Thus when your Excellency shall have added depth of Knowledge to the finenessof Spirits, and greatness of your Power, then indeed shall you lay a Trismegistus;and then, when all other Miracles and Wonders shall cease, by reason that youshall have discovered their natural Causes, your self shall be left the only Miracle

and Wonder of the World. (35)4

The philosophy that this counselor recommends will become well-knownin Bacons lifetime and, in some measure, due to Bacons leading efforts

as the study of nature and, more particularly, causality in nature; what wetoday call science. Bacons dream of a philosopher-prince who would literally

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embody the processes of natural philosophys illumination of natures secretsand natures causes was an enduring one: it is visible in Bacons earliestwritings (in another entertainment, Of Tribute , for example), and leads toBacons fantasy in his New Atlantis of an entire and ideal state literally

constructed on the model of the sovereignty of a natural philosophy expressedin the very structure and disposition of the state itself. 5 And although thisdream which reaches what in many ways is its highest articulation in themid-seventeenth century founding of the Royal Society would ultimatelyprove to be nothing more than a dream, Bacons fundamental vision of thepromise held out by the systematic and rigorous pursuit of natures causeswould prove generative outside of the court and beyond the prince, in thebirth and growth of multiple sites of specifically non-governmentalinvestment in the development of natural philosophy. 6 In fact, the four

action items (as it were) proposed by the second counselor theestablishment of a library, a garden, a cabinet, and a still-house areprecisely indicative of this private development of early modern science. Atthe same time, it is indicative of four important localizations or sites of emergence of particular domains or fields of scientific activity and pursuit.

At the same time that Bacons Device advocates these particular localizations or sites for the development of what will emerge as science, itis also itself a cultural performance that arises only within a particular social,political, and economic setting. The text of the Gesta Grayorum bears

all the marks of this kind of local and contingent emergence. Arrangedacross the Christmas holidays, 1594 95, the revels bore a particular relationto the calendar, were cyclical in nature (in that they were enacted annually,though not without the occasional hiatus). They were also organized andstructured in a particular relation to political and cultural institutions (themonarchy, most significantly) and practices (entertainments, theatricals,dances, etc.) and were akin to the pre-Lenten traditions of carnival, includingthe ritual election of a Lord of Misrule, in this case, Henry, Prince of Purpoole (Vickers, Francis Bacon532 notes). On the evening of January 3,1595, the evening of Bacons entertainment, Grays Inn played host to manyof the leading political figures of the time who were in attendance for theentertainment, including Bacons uncle William Cecil, Lord Burghley, aswell as the Lord Treasurer, the Vice-Chamberlain, and other members of the queens Privy Council. 7 The revels also featured the performance of aComedy of Errors (like to Plautus his Menechmus) by a company of playersthat was likely Shakespeares company, the Lord Chamberlains Men ( GestaGrayorum 22). As such, the revels were supremely self-conscious enactmentsof contact between a number of powerful and popular discourses of theperiod. 8

The importance of Bacons Device for this discussion of science andliterature in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England does not liein any claim to a privileged status as a point of origin either for science or for literature related to science. Indeed, part of the significance of beginning


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with Bacons entertainment is to highlight rather the opposite: that pointsof origin (of science or of literature) are only mythic in nature. We can nomore locate a point of origin for science than we can for literature. But asBacons Device indicates as indeed does the Renaissance more generally

we can certainly talk about moments of emergence and sites of emergence ,provided we understand that to do so is not to point to moments or sites of wholesale invention. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (as today),science is always in the process of emergence. And as current criticaldiscussions of science and early modern culture make clear and this servesas one of the defining features of much contemporary work that distinguishesit from its forebears science is not born in laboratories (or gardens or museums, for that matter) and then exported out to the culture at large. AsBacons Device makes clear, science predates its laboratories and museums

which are in fact produced as a response to the existence (perhaps nascent)of science. Laboratories, like gardens and museums, are as much amanifestation of culture as are theaters, voyages, and narratives about them.Much of the most engaging work in early modern science studies especiallyby those writers and critics interested in literary culture has precisely todo with the articulation of the moments and sites of the emergence of sciencewhich have multiplied exponentially in recent years. No longer (or even,no longer particularly) imagined as located in universities or colleges, scienceis instead seen as emergent within a wide array of cultural practices and

cultural sites: in New World discourse, for example, and in the early modernLondon playhouses; in the practices of religious devotional literature, andin the lines of lyric poetry. Readers and critics today are more likely tounderstand science and its many and varied literatures as profoundlylocal in nature and in circumstance, and therefore as contingent. In a word,they are emergent across the full spectrum of early modern culture and itspractices. And the burden of responsibility for readers and critics today isno longer one of division, of relating literary texts to a contemporaneousscientific background (or the inverse: relating scientific events to a literarybackground), but rather an integrative one: to conceive of what I wouldlike to call science-culture, a unity that predates the subsequent (thoughproblematical) division of the kingdom. This is the special promise of thestudy of early modern science-culture for, though never wholly detachedfrom each other, even in the early twenty-first century, the intimacy of science with culture and the unity of their connectedness is more readilyrecognizable to us than in our own era characterized by the widespreadbelief (fostered by the politics and, especially, the economics of Big Science)that science has been cordoned off as a special and privileged room of itsown.

Part of the work of the following discussion will be to offer a brief historyof the history of science as it impacts the study of early modern literatureand culture. As I will demonstrate, this history has two general phases. Thefirst, which begins in earnest in the science and literature criticism of the




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1930s and lasts well into the 1980s, is dominated by what I will call theinfluence model in which the issue most pressingly at stake is the labor of demonstrating the influence of science on literary texts in the early modernEnglish tradition. The second phase, the new wave of science and literature

criticism (as I will call it), begins to emerge in the 1980s and 90s and todevelop in more or less direct reaction to a certain revolution in sciencestudies, a term that I will use to designate the multi-disciplinary study of science as both a socially and an historically embedded set of practices andhabits of thought. This revolution in science studies will also therefore bepart of the story this essay will tell about early modernity, science, and literaryculture. The most significant consequence of second wave science andliterature criticism is a new understanding of the ways in which both thescientific and the literary are equally (though, of course, differently) engaged

in the production of knowledge. In the final section of this piece I offer abrief discussion of John Donnes Devotions Upon Emergent Occasionsas a casestudy of subjective writing (a term meant to encompasses both work inscience and work in literature) dedicated to the transformation of personalexperience into knowledge.

Another concern of this essay will be to investigate the nature of pre-disciplinary science, by which I mean science that is still embeddedwithin a range of cultural practices. As such, I will seek to avoid thinkingabout science as an already autonomous feature of early modernity; rather,

attention will be focused on the practices of science in the process, as itwere, of their separation from the various cultural sites that in this viewconstitute less points of origin than sites of emergence. 9 In this, I amfollowing the lead of French historian and philosopher of science, MichelSerres. Serres begins the introduction to a recently published anthology of essays, A History of Scientific Thought , by noting a disturbing problem: giventhe fact that we live in a world dominated by science and technology andtherefore are increasingly likely [to] question the whys and wherefores of its recent advent and sometimes even its legitimacy, it is a great paradoxthat in schools and universities the history of science is not taught in thesame way as the usual disciplines: it is only haphazard, depending on theinclination of the individual teacher (Serres, History of Scientific Thought 1).10Serres continues:

We generally learn about our history in isolation from that of the sciences. Westudy philosophy devoid of any scientific reasoning and great literature in splendiddetachment from its scientific context; we study various disciplines uprootedfrom the soil of their history, as if they had happened by chance. In short, our entire learning process is inappropriate to the real world in which we live, aworld which is a confused mixture of technology and society, of insane or wisetraditions and useful or disturbing innovations. (1)

While these comments reflect an understanding of the nature of the discipline or, more appropriately, the disciplines of science studies, they also posita new model for the nature of the relationship between the sciences and the Blackwell Publishing 2006 Literature Compass 3/3 (2006): 341 365, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00318.x



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rest of society. Serress metaphor of the confused mixture constitutes hismodel for understanding a relationship in which science is no longer conceived as a separate sphere, as a set of practices that exist at a certainisolating remove from society, as if science were somehow not itself a part

of society. Instead, for Serres, both science and the study of science are fullyembedded within the social context that produces them.One significant benefit of this deliberate re-locating of science as an object

of study within the social setting that as an evolving repertoire of practicesand objectives science has in fact always inhabited, is to neutralize thedeleterious effects of what Serres calls the cultural crisis caused in part bythis estrangement of science from society: This divorce between twoworlds is sometimes expressed as hostility and sometimes as adoration, bothof which are excessive (2). As Serress introduction and his work, more

generally makes clear, the great paradox of the study of science is amatter of history, of the ways in which science has come to be either theobject of hostility or perhaps even more problematically of adoration.It is in this spirit that the following discussion attempts neither to condemnnor to celebrate science, but rather to recover its socially and historicallysituated complexities. 11

Early Modern Science and Literature, 1: The First Wave

The notion of a moment or site of emergence, as suggested above, worksexplicitly against the idea of a point of origin and does so, in part, in order to avoid the liabilities of a certain teleological notion of progress that oftenattends narratives of the history of science a liability that John Henry, inhis book The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science , identifiesas whig history. There is a tendency, Henry writes, in the history of science to look back with hindsight about what is known to be importantlater (2). 12 Teleological understandings of the nature of science are alsoenabled by a conception of science as an accumulation of knowledge and

admonitions about the dangers of such a notion have been regular featuresof histories of science for many decades. Charles Singer begins his classicstudy, A Short History of Science to the Nineteenth Century (1941), with apreliminary discussion on just this concern; his introduction (Nature of theScientific Process), as its title suggests, recommends the rejection of thenotion of science as a body of knowledge and its replacement with a modelof process:

Science is often conceived as a body of knowledge . Reflection, however, will leadto the conclusion that this cannot be its true nature. History has repeatedly shownthat a body of scientific knowledge that ceases to develop soon ceases to bescience at all. The science of one age has often become the nonsense of the next.Consider, for example, astrology; or, again, the idea that certain numbers arelucky or unlucky. With their history unknown, who would see in thesesuperstitions the remnants of far-reaching scientific doctrines that once attractedclear-thinking minds seeking rational explanations of the working of the world? (1) 13




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But in spite of this recognition of the processive nature of science (asopposed to the merely accumulative body of knowledge argument), Singer slides into an uncritical progressive mode in which science inexorably movesforward into time and into greater accuracy. In Singers view, a

self-correcting science is governed by an always evolving which is to say,increasingly perfect rationality, even if perfection is understood always tobe receding into the distance. On this view, what are cast as former sciences(astrology, say), function less as the caution against a certain hubris on behalf of our own scientific knowledges that Singer claims they are, than simplyas instances of the finally non-scientific practices of the past. In Singersaccount, they become evolutionary dead-ends that serve to authorize theevolutionary model itself: nothing, one could say, authorizes our ownscientific culture more than the fact that we no longer believe in astrology

as a science.14

The triumphalist model of science and its history held by Singer whichwas, if not perfectly representative, than at least typical, of the study of science well into the 1970s was also the presiding model of science at theheart of literature and science studies across a wide range of periods andnational traditions. The literary critical work that this understanding of science (and of history) served to prompt was vast and varied, but in generalterms took more or less the form of influence studies. One particularly aptexample within the field of Renaissance literary studies focused on science

an example of what I would call the first-wave of science and early modernliterature studies can be found in the work of Marjorie Hope Nicolson.Nicolson published a significant number of important essays (and books) onRenaissance literature and its relation to science in the 1930s and 1940s. 15Six of her essays were collected and published in 1956 under the title Science and Imagination and as Nicolson announces in the first essay of the collection,The Telescope and the Imagination, she understands the relation of scienceto literature of the period not to be a matter of mere influence, but somethingaltogether more complicated and important. Discussing innovations anddiscoveries in astronomical science (which is the particular focus of all theessays collected in this volume), Nicolson wants to stress the structural impactof science on the mind or imagination of the literary artist:

There is a feeling here of change, of awareness of astronomical implication whichboth disturbs and fascinates the seventeenth-century mind. On the one hand,man is shrinking back from an unknown gulf of immensity, in which he feelshimself swallowed up; on the other, he is, like [Giordano] Bruno, rising onwings sublime to a spaciousness of thought he had not known before. Thepoetic and religious imagination of the century was not only influenced, butactually changed, by something latent in the new astronomy. ( Science and Imagination 2)

It becomes clear immediately, however, that Nicolsons argument aboutthe literature-science relationship is a fundamentally asymmetrical one inwhich the generative power of the new astronomy powerfully influences, Blackwell Publishing 2006 Literature Compass 3/3 (2006): 341 365, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00318.x



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and even changes, the literary imagination of the age: New figures of speechappear, new themes for literature are found, new attitudes toward life areexperienced, even a new conception of Deity emerges (2). In her discussionsof Galileos 1610 Sidereus Nuncius (the most important single publication,

it seems to me, of the seventeenth century, so far as its effect uponimagination is concerned (4)), for example, and in her more elaborate andsustained reading of John Donne, Nicolsons overall argument, as valuableas it has been, is nevertheless a limited one precisely because it is restrictedentirely to the ways in which literary texts were impacted by science. Oneof the presuppositions that supports this sort of understanding is anunquestioned belief in the already autonomous nature of science thatfunctions with a virtual agency to transform first the literary imagination,and then the literary texts which that imagination produces. Nicolsons is a

one-way street: science influences (or changes) literary production whilemaintaining a defining and isolating distance. There is never any considerationof the ways in which the literary is described as influencing (or changing)the scientific. An effect of this interpretive model is to relegate the literaryto an essentially reflective status because science produces literary consequences:

I shall try at the present time to reconstruct the instantaneous effect the discoveriesreported there [in Sidereus Nuncius] had upon the poets of Galileos own country,in order that their effect upon poetic imagination in England may be better understood. In the papers that follow, I shall trace the course of that effect inEngland, the merging of the Galilean ideas with those already native there, andthen shall follow the development of the telescope and microscope as they appear in literature, watching new figures of speech, new literary themes, new cosmicepics, most of all the transformation of poetic and religious imagination by ideaswhich, once grasped, man has never been able to forget. (4)

One of the particular figures of speech Nicolson will address in her discussion of the impact on the literary imagination of Galileos book isthe Columbus-motif (19) deployed by many poets in their praise of Galileosdiscoveries, among these poets were Thomas Seggett (one of Galileos Britishpupils in Padua), and Johannes Faber, whose commendatory poem (AdGalilaeum Lynceum Florentinum Mathematicorum . . .) was eventuallypublished in Galileos 1623 Il Saggiatore (The Assayer ) and in part reads,

Yield,Vespucci, and let Columbus yield. Each of theseHolds, it is true, his way through the unknown sea. . . .But you, Galileo, alone gave to the human race the sequence of stars,New constellations of heaven. 16

In the second chapter of Science and Imagination(The New Astronomyand English Imagination, first published in 1935) Nicolson offers a virtualinventory of early modern poets and writers who responded to Galileosbook; these included (in Nicolsons non-chronological ordering) WilliamDrummond of Hawthornden, Sir Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, PhineasFletcher, Abraham Cowley, Samuel Butler, William Davenant, Henry




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Vaughn, John Dryden, and Ben Jonson. 17 But Nicolsons greatest attentionand praise are lavished on John Donne:Among English poets, she writes,none showed a more immediate response to the new discoveries than JohnDonne, nor is there a more remarkable example of the effect of the Sidereus

Nuncius (46). For Nicolson, Keplers star of 1604 and Galileos book marktwo important shifts in Donnes poetic concerns: before 1604, Donnes starsare merely conventional (The Songs and Sonets, the majority of which werewritten before the turn of the century, contain no significant astronomicalfigures of speech (47)), while those that appear in the poetry after 1604 such as those that do in To the Duchess of Huntingdon are importantprecisely because they are new:

Who vagrant transitory Comets sees,Wonders, because they are rare: But a new starre

Whose motion with the firmament agrees,Is miracle, for there no new things are. (qtd. in Nicholson 48) 18

But the nova of 1604, by its very nature was transitory and eventually fadedfrom view. Likewise Donnes interest in the new stars, Nicolson argues,until 1610 and Galileos Sidereus Nuncius re-energizes Donnes interest notonly in the fact of the new stars, but in their meaning. The rest of Nicolsonschapter is devoted to tracing something of an evolution in Donne, from hissatiric treatment of the new astronomy in Ignatius His Conclave through to

his much more serious and anxious confrontation with it in AnAnatomy of the World: The First Anniversary, and other poems:

[T]he new stars appear and fade again, but they have ceased to be mere figuresof speech, and have taken in new meaning, as Donne sees the relation to cosmicphilosophy. They are a symbol of the Disproportion and the Mutability inthe universe of which Donne has become compellingly aware. (52)

For Nicolson, Donnes efforts to negotiate the new stars is epitomized inThe First Anniversary and as such the poem emerges as the great marker of a whole generations crisis of knowledge

Donnes most quoted lines, in which he reflects the poignant regret of ageneration which had inherited from the past centuries conceptions of order,proportion, unity, which had felt the assurance of the immutable heavens of Aristotle, take on new meaning when one reads them, remembering therevolution in thought that was occurring in 1610. (52) 19

As this brief outline suggests, for Nicolson and, indeed, for first-wave science and renaissance literature critics in general reading the poetry (andless often, the prose) of a figure such as Donne is largely a matter of readingthese texts against the scientific background of his time, against the inruptionof new stars and the dramatic discoveries of Galileos telescope (57). 20Indeed, it will take something like a virtual revolution in the study of scienceto dislodge the influence model and to clear the way for a new understandingof the relation between early modern science and literature that issymmetrical in nature. Blackwell Publishing 2006 Literature Compass 3/3 (2006): 341 365, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00318.x



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The Revolution in Science Studies

So long as the historical epistemologists such as Singer defined how weunderstood science, the influence model of literary studies was not onlysecured, but indeed the dominant model for understanding the relationshipbetween literature and science precisely because it seemed the inevitablemodel. But even as science cannot remain science if it is static (one of theaxioms of the historical epistemologists themselves), the history of sciencecannot remain vital if it is static. And indeed, as many scholars have noted,the history of science as a discipline (though, as we shall see, even thisdesignation is open to serious debate) undergoes not only challenge, butsomething very like a crisis, beginning in the 1970s and, in many ways, stillunfolding today. In their introduction to Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution,Robert S. Westman and David C. Lindberg offer a compelling (if brief )sketch of this crisis. For Westman and Lindberg (xviixviii), the historicalepistemologist trajectory that in many ways begins with Herbert Butterfields1949 book The Origins of Modern Science reaches something of a culminationin Thomas S. Kuhns landmark 1962 study, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In the years since these two books, and even as they havebecome part of a canon of pedagogical texts that appear annually in historyof science course lists (xviii), Westman and Lindberg argue that ageneration of scholars has been whittling away at all aspects of thehistoriographic corpus that Kuhns Structure and its sources presupposed(xviii). Among the contributing factors,Westman and Lindberg identify thefollowing: the discovery of archives either of lesser-known scientificfigures or new facts about more prominent ones; and the development of specializations within the broader field of the history of science. 21 At thesame time and as an important dimension indicative of the range anddepth of this shift in historiographic sensibility (xix) writers and criticsoffered an even more serious kind of challenge: the move fromintellectualist traditions and toward contextualization of problems and

solutions in specific intellectual polities (xix). This turn toward theinvestigation of the socially embedded nature of the scientific enterprise is

clear in a work such as Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffers important studyof Robert Boyle and emergent experimental practices in early modern,Leviathan and the Air-Pump a work, Westman and Lindberg argue, thatproblematized Boyles air-pump experiments by

denying customary distinctions among text, instrumentation, and experimentalfacts, and by viewing natural order not as something to be discovered but asa site of meanings produced by rival interest groups in struggles over politicalorder. (xix) 22

In addition to these forces at work in the history of science,Westman andLinberg also point to work in the sociology of scientific knowledge, as wellas the often-cited linguistic turn in cultural and intellectual history andliterary theory (xxi). 23 Given the rapid and extensive expansion of the kinds




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of work now undertaken by writers on the history of science,Westman andLindberg assert that historians of science are in greater disagreement todayabout how to conduct their craft than the ubiquitous metaphor of ScientificRevolution suggests (xx).

While this comment is itself embedded within a reappraisal of the verynotion of a scientific revolution, it also can be said to frame a larger discussionabout the nature of the history of science as a discipline . In his own essay inReappraisals, entitled Conceptions of the Scientific Revolution from Baconto Butterfield: A Preliminary Sketch, Lindberg offers an even moreprovocative assessment of contemporary crosscurrents within the historyof science that serve, in effect, to define disciplinarychallenges to the field.Deeply affected by a wide range of concerns by increasingspecialization; by the methodology and content of adjoining disciplines, by

alternative visions of the world; by fears about the impact of science oncontemporary society or about the separation of science from the humanities todays

Cultural historians of various methodological persuasions have sought tounderstand the relationship between science and innumerable other features of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European culture, such as magic, religion,education, art, literature, and technology. And, in what is undoubtedly thestrongest of the crosscurrents, social historians, influenced by Marxist thoughtor by developments in sociology, anthropology, and linguistics, have refused to

treat science as a purely intellectual quest for truth and have begun to raisequestions about its social and political construction. (Lindberg 19)

For Michel Serres, writing in his introduction to a collection of essays, AHistory of Scientific Thought: Elements of a History of Science , Lindbergscrosscurrents in fact constitute a new model for the history of science,atrue history of science, envisaged as an autonomous discipline with itschoices, its intentions, its divisions and its own style and methods.Describing this new vision of the history of science, Serres declares,It aimsto be more of an entity in itself than the deceptively clear account given ina complete encyclopedia of science covering the whole of history. Serrescontinues,

Far from tracing a linear development of continuous and cumulative knowledgeor a sequence of sudden turning-points, discoveries, inventions and revolutionsplunging a suddenly outmoded past instantly into oblivion, the history of scienceruns backwards and forwards over a complex network of paths which overlapand cross, forming nodes, peaks and crossroads, interchanges which bifurcateinto two or several routes. A multiplicity of different times, different disciplines,conceptions of science, groups, institutions, capitals, people in agreement or inconflict, machines and objects, predictions and unforeseen dangers, form together a shifting fabric which represents faithfully the complex history of science. ( Historyof Scientific Thought 6)

A proper response to the properly historical question about the causes of the sea-change in the nature of the history (histories) of science that has led Blackwell Publishing 2006 Literature Compass 3/3 (2006): 341 365, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00318.x



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us from the historical epistemologists to the exuberant pan-disciplinaritycelebrated by Serres would require more space than is available here. Butin addition to the emergence of Westman and Lindbergs shift inhistoriographic sensibility and Lindbergs crosscurrents specialization,

contextualization, the sociology of knowledge, the linguistic or semioticturn, etc. I would point to a set of equally important cultural forces thathave helped lead us to Serress shifting fabric.Among these would be theiconoclastic work of Paul Feyerabend, especially his landmark 1975 book,

Against Method , in which he offers a radical re-reading of science in thisparticular case it is the work of Galileo as marked by the rise of rationalism. 24 To this I would also add the rise of cultural studies; theemergence of the social studies of science, particularly as represented in thework of the Edinburgh school; and the sustained challenge to science studies

represented in the work of Bruno Latour.25

Perhaps the most significantforce not identified in such inventories as Lindberg offers is the cruciallyimportant and enabling impact of feminism in general, and feminist sciencestudies in particular. Among the many figures whose work has beentransformative, three of the most important are Evelyn Fox Keller, especiallyher critique of the Baconian ideology of the domination of nature throughthe science; Donna Haraway, especially her work on situated knowledges,and cyborg and cyborg culture; and N. Katherine Hayles and her work onposthumanism. 26

Early Modern Science and Literature, 2: The New Wave

In light of these new concerns about the nature of science, the nature of culture, and the nature of nature, the ways in which critics read and discussearly modern literature and its relation to science have necessarily beentransformed. As suggested near the outset of this essay, the foreground/background model of first-wave science and literature studies has given wayin a second wave to a more complex understanding in which not only thescientific, to the extent that it impacts or influences the literary, can be saidto produce the literary, but the equally complex and important ways in whichthe literary, for its part, can be said to produce the science. Indeed, as manyparticular instances from the period can demonstrate, the separation betweenscience and literature that selectively permeable barrier that conventionallyonly admits influence to pass through from one side to the other, fromscience to literature is itself more of a consequence of the emergence of science than its cause. In other words and I take this to be a goal of currentstudies of early modern literature and science culture the separationbetween science and literature (or, more broadly, culture) should beunderstood as one of the products of science and as such an ideal objectof our study rather than an unquestioned feature of history.

Another goal, then, of our contemporary studies is the telling of newnarratives about the unity of culture-science that has always been in place




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but has always been obscured by the (ideological) separation of science fromliterature, and the history of the construction of the separation betweenscience and the rest of culture. In this second wave, points of origin havebeen replaced by sites and moments of emergence. Bacons four principal

Works and Monuments begin to take on a new fullness within a more richand complex context provided by these new critical, interpretive, andtheoretical practices. The collecting of a most perfect and general Libraryadvocated in the Grays Inn entertainment, for example, opens on to studiesof the connected natures and histories of the book (especially the illustratedbook) and early modern scientific practice and discourse; or, on to the studyof the evolution of new reading practices coincident with the evolution of scientific optical instruments such as the microscope and the telescope. 27Bacons spacious, wonderful Garden emerges as the prototype of a

particular organization of nature deployed semiotically and as part of anepistemological (and political) discourse borne of new understandings of thenature of nature. 28 And similarly, Bacons goodly huge Cabinet and hisstill-house engender new histories of cabinets of curiosity and themuseum, on the one hand, and full-scale narratives of the socially-embeddedand determined space of the early modern laboratory, on the other. 29 Andof course, the list could be expanded to include other sites of emergence,including travel writing, New World exploration and colonization, thediscourses of monsters, the revision and expansion of university curricula,

and the early modern London theaters, among others. 30As this very brief outline suggests, the range of work undertaken by critics

today studying early modern science and literature is vast and various, andwhile no single example of this work can be truly representative, I wouldlike to mention briefly one recent book that can certainly be said to beillustrative of some of the major features of this new wave of criticism inthe field. Elizabeth Spillers 2004 study, Science, Reading and Renaissance Literature is dedicated, in its broadest terms, to the investigation of a sharedaesthetics of knowledge that underwrites both scientific and imaginativewriting in the period (3). Spiller begins by clearly marking the distinctionbetween the nature of her critical project and the more conventionalarguments about early modern science and literature, what has been identifiedin this discussion as the influence model. Naming in her introduction theworks of those scientific writers she will discuss (including William Gilbert,Galileo, William Harvey, Johannes Kepler, and Robert Hooke) and thosewriters of imaginative fiction she will consider (Philip Sidney, EdmundSpenser, and Margaret Cavendish), Spiller writes,

What these texts demonstrate is that early modern science is practiced as an artand, at the same time, that imaginative literature provides a form for producingknowledge. Within this framework, literary texts become more than just topicalcommentaries on new scientific discoveries or intellectually (but not trulyscientifically) interesting examples of the cultural work that literature mightproduce in the face of changing scientific knowledge. It is not just that fiction




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serves as a (more or less) accurate record of, as John Donne puts it, how the newphilosophy calls all in doubt. Rather, literary texts gain substance and intelligibilityby being considered as instances of early modern knowledge production. Earlymodern fiction needs to be looked at as more than just a kind of repository for new facts or errors. (2)

Similarly, science does not bear merely a superficial relation to imaginativewriting the deployment of certain literary devices, for instance, or narrative and rhetorical forms effectively borrowed from the literary domain.Indeed, the works of early modern science do not align themselves withearly modern poetry because of the ways in which they are written. For Spiller and, by extension, for the work I have called here second-wavecriticism of early modern science and literature (and which could perhapsalso be called the discursive model) the relation in question is a far moresignificant one in large part precisely because the line separating sciencefrom fiction (or science from culture) is never as absolute as the historicaland conventional wisdom would have us believe:

[S]cience maintains strong affiliations with poetic fictions because, in ways thatare rarely acknowledged, its practice emerges out of a central understanding of art as a basis for producing knowledge. A belief in the made rather than the foundcharacter of early modern knowledge unites poets and natural scientists. (2) 31

Spillers study informed by an understanding of the central role playedby artifice within both scientific and imaginative writing is characteristicof the best of the new wave of criticism: it reads scientific texts on the sameplaying field as literary texts; it refuses the easy separation of the twocultures described in C. P. Snows classic account; and, most helpfully, ithighlights the common goal shared by both early modern science andliterature [to] convert accounts of personal experience into new stories of universal truth (15). It is this notion of the transformation of personalexperience into something like a universally-valid truth that lies at the veryheart of what I will call subjective writing. One of the asymmetries thatfollows from the traditional notion of a separate science always in the processof perfecting its own purely rational discourses of science, that is, whichis increasingly objectively true is the casual unwillingness to think of scientific writing as subjective, since the subjective (so the argument goes)is the privileged domain and, more to the point, the privileged writing of the literary. But new science studies in general, and early modern sciencestudies perhaps in particular, is equally unwilling to accept this asymmetry.But what would symmetrical subjective writing be?

Science, Literature, and Subjective Writing: A Case Study

For this brief excursus into subjective writing, I will turn to that figure whohas been central to this discussion and to discussions of early modern literatureand science since the early 20 th century: John Donne and to his Devotions




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Upon Emergent Occasions(1626), in particular. While the status of the Devotionsas an autobiographical text has been much debated, I will argue that theDevotions participates in the widely varied textual and discursive practicesof what will become identifiably autobiography in the early modern period. 32

Elaine Scarry has argued that with its defining interest in interrogating thestatus of the body, and especially its sheer physicality, the DevotionsrepresentsDonnes desire to understand volitional materialism (an ambition modeledon Gods example, including his willful embodiment as human) that marksa certain set of mental and authorial habits that characterize Donnes poetryand prose. While Scarry acknowledges that the desire to confront materialismand re-theorize its relation to the self is not exclusive to Donne but in factcharacterizes the early modern period in general and, in particular, therather glacial change from a religious to a secular and scientific world, the

finer details of this glacial change have not yet been articulated (Donne71). I would like to argue that more than mere mental habit, Donnesconfrontation with materialism and his attempts to renegotiate its relationto both body and self are themselves organized by an epistemology in theprocess of forging the means to convert (recalling Spillers words)accounts of personal experience into new stories of universal truth. It isthis epistemology that in first-wave science and literature criticism wasuniformly construed as the proprietary domain of science that producedknowledge of the natural world; this knowledge along with the idea of

science as a master discourse was then reflected in literary works said tobe constructed (at least in part) under the influence of science. Insecond-wave criticism (or what I have also called here the discursive model),this epistemology is more appropriately understood as shared equally betweenemergent science and literary culture. Indeed, this epistemology can best beunderstood as dispersed across the culture, more generally. Such anunderstanding locates both science and literature within a mutually sustainingnetwork that denies privilege or priority to either one. In this way, thenotion of influence especially when it is imagined as unidirectional becomes a meaningless category. As such, with the scientific and the literaryas both manifestations (or articulations) of an underlying epistemology, wecan better appreciate the symmetrical relationship between them.

Criticism of Donne has long been interested in his sensitivity to bothold and new philosophy in the period, and, indeed, to the tensionsbetween these two systems within that moment (some would call itmodernity) that witnesses the gradual, though finally permanent, eclipseof the former by the latter. In his prose, as in his poetry, Donne seems tostraddle these two worlds. On the one hand, he offers a very clear andunequivocal condemnation of new philosophy/new science when in IgnatiusHis Conclave (for instance) he celebrates Copernicus for his innovation incosmology that has earned him the right to compete in Hell for the seat of honor alongside Satan and his throne. Or, in the Devotions, Donne on manyoccasions displays something like a temperamental sympathy with the




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antiquated Ptolemaic universe that at times (in Meditation 10, for instance)indeed seems to structure Donnes imagination:

This is Natures nest of boxes;The Heavens containe the Earth, the Earth, Cities,Cities, Men,And all these are Concentrique ; the common center to them all, is decay,

ruine ; only that is Eccentrique , which was never made; only that place, or garmentrather, which we can imagine , but not demonstrate ,That light, which is the veryemanation of the light of God , in which the Saints shall dwell, with which theSaints shall be appareld, only that bends not to this Center , to Ruine ; that whichwas not made of Nothing , is not threatned with this annihilation. All other thingsare; even Angels, even our soules; they move upon the same poles, they bend tothe same Center ; and if they were not made immortall by preservation, their Nature could not keep them from sinking to this center , Annihilation. (Devotions51)

On the other hand, Donne at times offers, perhaps rather grudgingly,

some acceptance of new philosophy. In Meditation 21, for instance, after rising from his sickbed for the first time since falling ill, Donne takes hisunsteadiness and his vertigo as figures for a Copernican world:

I am up, and I seeme to stand , and I goe round ; and I am a new Argument of thenew Philosophie , That the Earth moves round; why may I not believe, that thewhole earthmoves in a round motion, though that seeme to mee to stand , when asI seeme to stand to my Company, and yet am carried, in a giddy, and circular motion,as I stand ? (111) 33

While Donnes relation to the new science was clearly a complex andperhaps troubled one and speaks to a more or less individual set of sympathiesand antipathies, the argument has been made that the advent of the newscience within the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had a deleteriouseffect on the traditions of spiritual autobiography which, as Kate Gartner Frost has argued, were characterized by the use of typology, fictive devices,and deliberate structure:

Chief among [the intellectual and scientific changes impacting spiritualautobiography] was the so-called Copernican revolution: No longer could theindividual place himself within a coherent moral and spiritual structure; no longer could he see his life played out on a recognizable stratum of the universal hierarchy;no longer was ones very physical existence reflected in and magnified by thespeculum of correspondences that composed the late-medieval cosmos. (78)

Frost also suggests that alongside new philosophy as a determining forcein the reconceptualization of spiritual autobiography there are other, equallypowerful, social and discursive forces that contributed to these transformationsthat, taken together, inexorably moved the writers focus toward the

subjective (78).34

I think there is much value in Frosts argument, especiallyif we understand the transformation of spiritual autobiography intoautobiography as at least in part characterized by this move toward thesubjective and that the subjective itself becomes more fully available (evenif in part compensatorily) in the absence of earlier (that is, medieval andscholastic) schemas rendered obsolete with the advent of the modern




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world. At the same time, however, there are ways in which autobiographicalwriting such as the Devotionsis enabled more positively and precisely by theprotocols and practices of a new epistemology that was simultaneouslyemerging in the culture of science. In fact, the Devotions is an especially

compelling text on this score because in it we can trace the contour linesof confrontation between the older, essentially scholastic, systems of correspondences that determined meaning in the world and the newer epistemological system of induction and experiment that created meaning inthe world.

These are broad claims not only about Donnes book, but about thenature of early modern science and its continuities and, more importantly,its discontinuities with early epistemological (to say nothing of theological)systems of belief. For the remainder of this brief discussion, however, I have

chosen to focus attention on two particular aspects of the Devotions: first,the ways in which experience becomes understood and validated asevidential, and second, the ways in which the evidential is deployed in theproduction of meaning that is itself understood to be universal. Whenindexed to a text that is autobiographical, this becomes a matter of a differentform of transliteration: from the personal to the generalized.

There are any number of important moments in the Devotions in whichthese questions can be localized, including the books first sentence, theuniversalizing desire of which is clear: Variable, and therefore miserable

condition of Man; this minute I was well, and am ill, this minute (7). Butthe clarity of this desire to create universally true knowledge that the fallen,and therefore natural condition of man is misery itself obscures a verycomplex set of logical and inductive maneuvers. What is it that allows Donneto move from Man in the opening phrase, to I in the second? Whatallows for this sort of transliteration? There are two answers to thesequestions. The first corresponds to what I earlier called the scholasticepistemological model of correspondences that dictated a certain, andpredicted, meaning to such a sentence: Mans condition in the world ismiserable; I am a man, therefore I am miserable. The logic of this isundeniable. And yet, this is not the only and not, I want to say, thepresiding logic within the Devotions. The second answer to our questionspoints to a more rigorously inductive response which will come to typifynot only the scientific but also the literary epistemological mode moregenerally: I am miserable; I am a man, therefore the condition of man inthe world is miserable. In the former statement, which is wholly teleologicalin form and nature, that which the statement would prove is itself accepteda priori as a truth: Mans condition is miserable. In this sense, such astatement cannot be said to prove anything at all, other than its own perfectsolipsism, and as such it functions in the opening moment of the Devotionsas a statement of faith or belief. For the latter, to the contrary, it is Donnesontology he is a man and he is miserable that are taken as a priori truthsand the conclusion, the thing that is proved, is the universally miserable




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condition of all men. But what it is, in turn, that allows Donnes argumentto proceed along the trajectory outlined here in the second model? Theanswer, I would argue, is experience. Donne is empowered to concludethat the condition of man is miserable not because this is his starting point,

but rather because this is his conclusion, and it is a conclusion that is notbased on faith or belief, but rather on embodied experience that establishesthe validity of his argument.

Indeed, the central problem of the book lies in the indeterminacy of thenature of experience itself: never wholly material nor wholly immaterial,experience by its very nature resists the sort of transliteration into a fullyspiritual register that would render it functional in Donnes exegetical practiceand thereby instrumental to his larger devotional ambitions. The text bearsmany significant instances of this recognition of an ontological hybridity

(mind/body) that characterizes what one might be tempted to call the humancondition. Though in Expostulation 22 (among other moments in the text)Donne will articulate a certain semiotic and assert that the body associatesto the soul in the model of a signifier I know that in the state of my body,which is more discernible , than that of my soule, thou dost effigiate my Soule to me ( Devotions 119) this assertion does not seem sufficient to resolvethe more fundamental problem that Donne cannot truly say what the bodyis and what the soul is, particularly in relation to the etiology of sin (andconsequently of his physical sickness) that his meditations, expostulations,

and prayers collectively seek to discover:My God , my God , what am I put to, when I am put to consider , and put off , theroot , the fuell , the occasionof my sicknesse ? What Hypocrates, what Galen, couldshew mee that in my body? It lies deeper than so; it lies in my soule : And deeper than so; for we may wel consider the body, before the soule came, beforeinanimation, to bee without sinne ; and the soule before it come to the body, beforethat infection, to be without sinne ; sinne is the root , and the fuell of all sicknesse , and

yet that which destroies body & soule , is in neither , but in both together ; It is in theunion of the body and soule ; and, O my God , could I prevent that, or can I dissolve

that? (118)As this passage suggests, attempts to define sin (like the correlative attemptsto define body and soul), falter upon the prior problems of materialism ingeneral, and embodiment in particular. If the intellection chronicled in theDevotions is anguished, it is so not only because thought (through writtenlanguage, which is its sign) is called upon to express the burden of atranslation of experience (from the somatics of disease to the certitude of spiritual redemption), but also because thought itself may be the expression

of the defining incommensurability of body and soul.The nature of experience, then, is central to the work of the Devotions,even as the creation and communication of experience becomes foundationalto the practices of science. In Discipline and Experience , Peter Dear identifiesthe crucial distinction between Aristotelian definitions of experience (suchas presided over medieval and scholastic epistemology) and the scientific




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understanding of experience emergent in Europe in the seventeenth centuryas fundamentally a matter of the importance of the particular andparticularized historical event (or, in its more fully evolved form, theevent experiment):

Throughout the seventeenth century, the touchstone for definitions of experiencein the literature philosophical discourse of Western Christendom remained thewritings of Aristotle. An experience in the Aristotelian sense was a statementof how things happen in nature, rather than a statement of how something had happened on a particular occasion: the physical world was a concatenation of established but sometimes wayward rules, not a logically integrated puzzle. Butthe experimental performance, the kind of experience upheld as the norm inmodern scientific practice, unlike its Aristotelian counterpart; it is usuallysanctioned by reports of historically specific events. (4) 35

Further, Dear argues that the revolutionizing power of science lies in themetaphorical functioning of experiment (158) the particular mechanismthat allows one to argue that the occurrences within any given particular historical event/experiment are generalizable to the greater world. Citingthe work of Pascal with Torricellian tubes and William Gilberts with theterrella(the little earth, a machined spherical lodestone), Dear demonstrateshow early modern science breaks down and revises the traditional art/naturedistinction in such as way as to render experimental (that is, contrived or artificial ) results not so much semiotically metaphorical, as rather mimeticallymetaphorical. For Pascal, then, the Torricellian tube that demonstrates thepossibility of a vacuum does not here signifyan aspect of the world, butrather is actually like that aspect of the world in some essential way thereis a movement toward identity. Similarly, for Gilbert, the terrellademonstrates the magnetic characteristics of the earth:

The little earth and the great earth are interactively related so as to set up a kindof identity: the terrella does not simply imitate the earth, so as to elucidateproperties of the latter, and the earth does not represent a giant terrella, so as toelucidate properties of magnets. Instead, the earth is a magnet, and the terrella,possessing the proper shape for a magnet, is a little earth. (159)

In similar fashion, Donne is able to establish the generalized validity of hisconclusions (which are not limited, of course, to statements about the miseryof man, but are more centrally about the discovery of salvation throughthe various processes of disease and recovery) because for him disease is amimetic metaphor for the state and fate of his soul. The conclusions hereaches through the Devotionsemerge as the consequences of his experienceof disease, rather than as simply functions of his particular religious beliefs.It is for this reason, I believe, that the lessons learned through the narrativeoffered in the Devotions, are anything but surprising. Donne concludes thathe can neither heal his own body, nor save his own soul from damnation:

To cure the sharpe accidentsof diseases, is a great worke; to cure the disease it selfe ,is a greater; but to cure the body, the root , the occasionof diseases, is a worke




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reserved for the great Physitian, which he doth never any other way, but by glorifying these bodiesin the next world. (11718)

The difference, though, between these lines as conclusions drawn fromsomething that had happened because of a disease, and similar lines or, indeed,

even these same lines as predictions of what happens because of a disease,is absolute. It is the same distinction that obtains between the scientificnarrative of what happened to my body in illness and the Aristotelianprognoses of what happens to the body in illness.

There remains for now one final question: what renders Donnes Devotionsdistinct from any other prior or contemporary personal accounts of an event,since not all such accounts are either necessarily autobiographical or properlyscientific? Or, to phrase this another way: what makes Donnes experienceof his nearly fatal illness an experiment? The answer, I suggest, lies in thefact that Donne writes his account after the fact and can only do so once hehas already transformed (transliterated) his experience and himself intoartifacts of interpretive and, perhaps especially, written discourse. In other words, what is crucial to understanding the Devotions as scientific and autobiographical is the operational identity of the observed and observingself.

This is not to say that all autobiographical writing is essentially scientific,but it may be to suggest that all scientific writing the chronicles of eventsand the observing self is fundamentally autobiographical.

Notes

1 For examples of these analyses, see two substantial and representative collections of essays,Vickers,ed. Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance and Pumfrey et al., ed. Science, Culture and Popular Belief in Renaissance Europe . Pumfrey et al. provide a useful topical bibliography (293317).2 Very useful overviews of Bacons contributions to the rise of induction and the scientificmethod can be found in Bacon, New Organon, Jardine, and Rossi.3

For a helpful discussion of the complex textual history of this piece, including an overview of the debates once surrounding its attribution to Bacon, see Brian Vickerss edition, Oxford Authors,5312.4 Trismegistus refers to the legendary Hermes Trismegistus (Hermes the thrice greatest)thought to be a contemporary of Moses and author of a vast array of mystical or occult texts.5 Of Tribute and New Atlantis are both reprinted in Vickerss edition (pp. 22 51 and 457 89respectively).6 The birth and development of (non-governmental) institutions, societies, and even less formalassociations and gatherings dedicated to the study of nature and causality in nature was acontinent-wide phenomenon. For an extended discussion of one of these the Academy of Linceans, founded by Federico Cesi (and which included Galileo among its members) see Freedberg.7 Gesta Grayorum offers a partial list of visiting dignitaries and officials:

On the 3d. of January at Night, there was a most honourable Presence of Great and NoblePersonages, that came as invited to our Prince; as namely, the Right Honourable the LordKeeper, the Earls of Shrewsbury, Cumberland , Northumberland , Southampton, and Essex, the LordsBuckhurst , Windsor , Mountjoy, Sheffield , Compton, Rich, Burleygh, Mounteagle , and the LordThomas Howard ; Sir Thomas Henneage , Sir Robert Cecill ; with a great number of Knights, Ladiesand very worshipfull Personages: All which had convenient Places, and very goodEntertainment, to their good Liking and Contentment. (25)




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8 By its very title the Gesta Grayorum makes reference to an earlier collection of moral tales, theGesta Romanorum. Derived from tales and stories in Latin and assembled in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth centuries, the allegorical and moralizing tales of the Gesta Romanorum wereenormously popular and influential. The various compilations of these stories and their textualembodiment in printed versions was altogether a fluid matter, but one particular textualization,assembled and translated by Richard Robinson, was published in London in 1595 (and again in1602 and 1610) was widely popular. Richardsons text carried the title A Record of Auncient Histories,intituled in Latin: Gesta Romanorum ; its extended title included the phrase Discoursing upon sundryexamples for the advauncement of vertue, and the abandoning of vice and in it perhaps we hear a formulation that Bacon himself later would adopt and transform into the title of one of his greattexts, The Advancement of Learning . But whether or not Bacon was making conscious reference toRobinsons extended title for his Gesta Romanorum, it is clear that these two texts capture not onlyin title, but in spirit two contrary trends: the movement, on the one hand, toward the reiterationand repetition of allegorical tales for moral training, and, on the other, the critical shift not onlyaway from inherited wisdom (even if it comes in the form of short narratives) toward aforward-facing interest in the new and the novel, but also the shift in concern from moral discipline(vertue) toward the embracing of learning, an embrace that will later become its own versionof morality.9 A final word before beginning the discussion proper: what we typically think of as early modernscience is a very broad field indeed that encompasses any number of disciplinary practices, customaryobjects of study, and particular goals and objectives. And while early modern science can meanmedicine, alchemy, anatomy, biology, horticulture, physics, mechanics, optics, mineralogy,geometry, mathematics, astronomy, among many other fields, I will use the term predominatelyin a general sense that is meant to designate an emergent set of mental practices and habits of thought that can be said to inform those various disciplinary articulations of science that we areused to thinking about now as separate fields of study.10 Serres works in and across a wide range of disciplines; Ren Girard, in his introduction toSerress book Detachment , writes,Michel Serres has written a great deal about scientific discovery,and yet to define him as a historian or even as a philosopher of science would not do justice tothe breadth of his work (vii). For Serress work that does fall into these fields, see especiallyTroubadour of Knowledge ; Natural Contract ; Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy; and, with BrunoLatour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time .11 The problem of history identified by Serres is the explicit concern of Bruno Latour, one of theleading figures in science studies today. In his book We Have Never Been Modern, Latour offers asustained and highly critical analysis of the emergence (in the wake of Kant) of what he callsthe modern Constitution that is characterized by a double motion: toward the establishment of the very notion of the wholly separate spheres of Nature and Culture, on the one hand, and thesimultaneous cancellation of this absolute polarity, on the other. See chapter three, especiallyLatours discussion of what he calls (following Michel Serres) quasi-objects and quasi-subjects.

See also Science in Action, Pandoras Hope , and Politics of Nature .12 Henry continues:To judge the past in terms of the present is to be whiggish. In the early decades of theformation of the discipline it was common for a historian of science to pick out from, say,Galileos work, or Keplers, those features which were, or could most easily be made to looklike, direct anticipations of currently held science. The resulting history was often a lamentabledistortion of the way things were. (2)

13 Singer wrote extensively on the history of science, with particular attention on anatomy, biology,technology, and the history of medicine.14 The very structure of Singers book carries and delivers its own potent portion of this evolutionaryargument:Chapter 1. Rise of Mental Coherence. The Foundations (600400 B.C.): Ionia, Magna

Graecia, Athens. Chapter 2. The Great Adventure. Unitary Systems of Thought (400 300B.C.): Athens. Chapter 3. The Failure of Nerve. Divorce of Science and Philosophy (300B.C.A.D. 200): Alexandria.These chapters are followed by two additional chapters recountingfailures, Chapter 4, subtitled Science the Handmaid of Practice, on Imperial Rome, and Chapter 5 on the Middle Ages and subtitled Theology, Queen of Sciences. But, true to the progressivemodel (which also happens to have been essentially the same model practiced by many historiansof literature), Singers story begins its move toward a happy ending, with the Renaissance serving




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as the great pivot:Chapter 6. The Revival of Learning. The Rise of Humanism (12501600). TheAttempted Return to Antiquity,Chapter 7. The Insurgent Century. Downfall of Aristotle (1600

1700). New Attempts at Synthesis, and ending (literally, culminating) in Chapter 8. TheMechanical World. XVIIIthXIXth Century. Enthronement of Determinism (170019 th Century).15 Nicolson wrote widely on seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century writers and poets such as

John Donne, John Milton, Samuel Pepys,Alexander Pope, and Isaac Newton; see Newton Demandsthe Muse , Breaking of the Circle , and Pepys Diary and the New Science .16 This is Nicolsons translation of Faber,Ad Galilaeum Lynceum Florentinum MathematicorumSaeculi Nostri Principem Mirabilium in Caelo per Telescopium Novum Naturae OculumInventorem, ( Science and Imagination, 19). Nicolson also cites the long poem Adone , by GiambattistaMarino; a sonnet by Piero de Bardi; as well as Andrea Salvadores poem Per le Stelle Medicee,and Adulatio Pernicisa, written by Maffeo Barberini who would later be known as Pope UrbanVIII and become infamous for his participation in the official condemnation of Galileo.17 Nicolsons catalog is interrupted, as it were, with two oddities: first, a brief discussion of Chrisopher Marlowe,whose imagination would have responded most sensitively to the poeticimplications of the new astronomy [but] died too early to know them (41). The second isanother brief discussion of a dramatist, this time Shakespeare who, though he indeed lived to learnof the new astronomy, evidently did not care much about it though, Nicolson offers, if he ever expressed himself on the new cosmology, he should have done so in King Lear , written whilemens minds were dwelling on the significance of the new star of 1604 (43).18 For the entire text of the poem, see Donne, Oxford Authors, 6770.19 Interestingly, Nicolson also sees this poem and this struggle as pivotal in Donnes life itself and an answer to the perhaps by-now tired question of Donnes conversion:

Paradox and ProblemeDonne remains to his modern critics,who will probably never agreeabout the conversion that transformed Jack Donne into Dr. John Donne, Dean of St.Pauls. . . . I shall continue to believe that the discoveries of the new astronomy, coincidingwith a troubled period in his own personal life and in his age, proved that straw that brokethe back of his youthful skepticism and led John Donne from the mistresse of my youth,Poesy, to the wife of mine age, Divinity. (57)

20 Donnes poetry and prose have been of abiding interest to critics of early modern science andliterature. The bibliographies of modern Donne criticism assembled by John R. Roberts list dozensof entries; see Roberts, John Donne: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism 1912 1978 , 2vols. and John Donne: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism, 19791995 . See also Coffin,

John Donne and the New Philosophy; Empson, Essays on Renaissance Literature,Volume One , especiallychapter two,Donne the Space Man, 78128.21 History of science,Westman and Lindberg write,was beginning to be transformed into anencampment of specialists. Specialization brought with it an impatience with conceptual vignettesand broadly brushstroked stories; the new historians focused instead on aspects or periods of intellectual evolution, on discovery, and especially on elements previously marginalized by too

exclusive attention to the Greats (xviii).22 See Shapin and Schaffer. See also Shapins later book, Social History of Truth .23 For two discussions of this turn, see: Latour, One More Turn, 272 94; Lenoir 119 36.Both of these are reprinted (Latours in an abridged form) in Biagioli, The Science Studies Reader (pp. 27689 and 290301, respectively).24 In a striking passage on Galileos astronomical writings and on the so-called rationalism of thescientific method, more generally Feyerabend identifies the fundamental insufficiency of rationalargument:

It is clear that allegiance to the new ideas will have to be brought about by means other thanarguments. It will have to be brought about by irrational meanssuch as propaganda, emotion,ad hoc hypotheses, and appeal to prejudices of all kinds. We need these irrational means in

order to uphold what is nothing but a blind faith until we have found the auxiliary sciences,the facts, the arguments that turn the faith into sound knowledge. (1534)25 For an example of the work in science studies identified by the Edinburgh School label, see Bloor.26 Keller, especially chapter two, Baconian Science: The Arts of Mastery and Obedience.Haraway, Situated Knowledges, 575 600; both this important essay and with her landmarkessay Cyborg Manifesto are reprinted in Haraways Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (183201 and14981, respectively). Hayles, How We Became Posthuman.




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27 See Frasca-Spada and Jardine, for example, and for a recent collection of essays on the natureand role of authorship within the cultures of science, see Biagioli and Galison.28 See Bushnell; Marchitello, 14377.29 For cabinets and museums, see Findlen; Preston, 17083; Swann; Impey and MacGregor. For discussions of the early modern scientific laboratory and its practices, see Shapin.30 For discussions of travel and the New World, see, for example, Campbell; Fuller; Albanese.For a discussion of monsters, see Daston and Park. For an analysis of the disciplines and curriculaof geography, see Cormack. And for discussions of the early modern theaters, see, for example,Mazzio, 85105; Smith, 147 68; Paster, Body Embarrassed and Humoring the Body;Traub.31 Spillers study ranges over a number of scientific fields, including anatomy, embryology,experimental philosophy, magnetism, astronomical observation, optics, and microscopy.32 In identifying Donnes text and project as autobiographical, however, I am following thelead of many critics of seventeenth century literature; see, for instance, Frost, esp. ch. 1 and 2;Mueller, 119, in which Mueller argues that the Devotions(which, like Donnes Essays in Divinity,bears a strangely potent blending of spiritual autobiography and textual analysis (4)) representsDonnes efforts toward attaining [a] spiritual perspective on experience (6).33 In the next line Donne immediately retreats to the security of the strictly concentric universe:Man hath no center , but misery; there are onely there , hee is fixt , and sure to finde himselfe (111).34 So radical were these changes, Frost argues, that critics today throw doubt on the existence of real autobiography prior to the 17 th or 18 th century (78).35 See also ch. 3 (on experimental events) and 5 (The Uses of Experiment).

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. The Oxford Authors: Francis Bacon, A Critical Edition of the Major Works. Ed. B. Vickers.Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.

Biagioli, M. The Science Studies Reader . New York: Routledge, 1999. and P. Galison, eds. Scientific Authorship: Credit and Intellectual Property in Science . New York:

Routledge, 2003.Bloor, D. Knowledge and Social Imagery. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976.Bushnell, R. Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003.Butterfield, H. The Origins of Modern Science, 13001800 . London: G. Bell, 1949.

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Howes, D., ed. Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader . Oxford: Berg, 2005.Impey, O. and A. MacGregor, eds. The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth-

and Seventeenth-Century Europe . Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985. Jardine, L., Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse . Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1974.Keller, E. F., Reflections on Gender and Science . New Haven:Yale UP, 1985.Kuhn,T. S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.3rd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.Latour, B. One More Turn After the Social Turn. . . . The Social Dimension of Science . Ed. Ernan

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