Book contents
- Taste and Knowledge in Early Modern England
- Taste and Knowledge in Early Modern England
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Note on the Text
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 ‘To dream to eat Books’
- Chapter 2 Anatomizing Taste
- Chapter 3 From Eve’s Apple to the Bread of Life
- Chapter 4 ‘Those Fruits of Natural knowledge’
- Chapter 5 ‘Honey secrets’
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 5 - ‘Honey secrets’
Erotic Sweetness and Epistemology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 October 2020
- Taste and Knowledge in Early Modern England
- Taste and Knowledge in Early Modern England
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Note on the Text
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 ‘To dream to eat Books’
- Chapter 2 Anatomizing Taste
- Chapter 3 From Eve’s Apple to the Bread of Life
- Chapter 4 ‘Those Fruits of Natural knowledge’
- Chapter 5 ‘Honey secrets’
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter asks how the early modern association of eroticism with sweetness, and romantic betrayal with bitterness, correlates to the affiliation between taste and knowledge described in preceding chapters. I suggest that authors including Richard Barnfield, Shakespeare, and Thomas Carew forge links between sensual pleasure and non-ratiocinative epistemologies, using the bitter/sweet opposition to endorse a rhetorical conception of knowledge as innately relational. Erotic experience is reconceptualised as a source of epistemological mastery, and the language of taste emerges as instrumental within what Faramerz Dabhoiwala terms the seventeenth-century ‘sexual revolution’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Taste and Knowledge in Early Modern England , pp. 183 - 222Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020