The flourishing of the essay as a protean literary form in an age marked by growing interest in essaying systematic knowledge reflects a tension within eighteenth-century empiricism. Two divergent subgenres emerged from this tension. The conversational essay, first, drew upon a Montaignian tradition rooted in scepticism, dialogue, and performative rationality; these essays were associated with a form of pragmatic empiricism at ease with the idea of human knowledge as intersubjectively constituted in the public domain. On the other hand, the systematic essays of the Enlightenment, spurred on by John Locke’s attempt to establish ‘order’ in intellectual inquiry, deployed the essay as an instrument for establishing Universal Truth and what Leibniz termed ‘demonstrative knowledge’. In considering the epistemology of the eighteenth-century essay in Britain, this chapter explores not only how this bifurcated empiricism influenced the development of the essay, but also the ways in which the essay reconstituted empiricism itself.

This chapter examines the origins and style of the early English essay, in order to consider the peculiarities of the form. The first section discusses the vexed origins of the English essay, which arrived on the literary scene both as an innovation, and as a continuation of older forms of moral discourse. It argues that essays were characterised by a paradoxical relationship to temporality, affecting both how the form began, and its style, in representing thought and thinking. Examining the style of essays by Francis Bacon, William Cornwallis, Nicholas Breton, Owen Felltham, and John Hall, the chapter uncovers a tension between flow and stasis, evident in punctuation and the structure of sentences. Rather than taking this to signal two distinct styles of the early English essay, associated respectively with Montaigne and Bacon, the chapter argues that it is the tension that is characteristic, oscillating between the representation of deliberation and decision.

Focusing on Donne’s view of natural theology, especially from 1614 onward, this chapter makes two central claims. First, considering Donne biographically, I argue that while there is important continuity in Donne’s career (insofar as he engages with the book of nature throughout), his vocational turn in the years 1611–1614 refocuses, reshapes, and intensifies that engagement: the skeptical and noncommittal attitude toward apprehension of the divine in the sensible world that can be traced in the Songs and Sonnets is replaced by a clearer and altogether more hopeful tone in the Essayes, with Donne further developing his insights about the book of nature in his sermons and the Devotions. Second, I argue that Donne’s insights deserve to be included in historical studies of natural theology in the early seventeenth century and his exclusion has been partly facilitated by scholarly emphasis on his earlier work, although this is changing.

This chapter examines how reading – and sharing and discussing and debating – libels brought early modern people together as publics. Following the conjoined careers of libels and talk about libels, it sketches the interpretive practices that characterized their circulation across manuscript, print, and performance. The chapter begins with a small but representative slice of the scribal archive to illustrate how libels spread and were read. Its sources include Francis Bacon’s government white papers, a poem by King James, and two libels bearing annotations – the first in the hand of Robert Cecil, the second by an anonymous copyist – that have received virtually no attention. The remainder of the chapter turns to a different kind of evidence: fictional representations of reading. It successively considers Leicester’s Commonwealth – an anonymous Catholic prose tract printed in 1584 – and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599). Both the pamphlet and the play self-reflexively train their audiences in the art of interpreting libels. Taken together, this chapter’s eclectic archive maps the networks of physical and discursive spaces that made up the early modern public sphere.

This chapter considers Herbert and Vaughan’s foundational views of science and nature, toward exploring their views of natural theology more specifically in Chapter 4. How does each poet conceive of the relationships between God, humans and nature, and does he see human inquiry into nature as leading to theological insight? Both Herbert and Vaughan engage these questions, though they differ starkly on the answers. Vaughan is less dismissive of human science than is Herbert, for instance. And although both poets share a conviction that the natural world is not as it should be, Herbert sees the world as destined for conflagration while Vaughan’s hope—repeated throughout Silex Scintillans—is instead for regeneration.

This chapter offers a survey of religious dissimulation in early modern England, where questions concerning its legitimacy were, owing to the unpredictable course of the English Reformation(s), arguably more pressing than anywhere else in Europe. While most Catholic and Protestant theological authorities condemned dissimulation in principle, the practice must have been widespread and was perceived, at least by those in power, as a political reality that could not simply be ignored. This chapter outlines both ecclesiological and political justifications for tolerating those who dissembled their faith and argues that their ambivalent status and the often unstable practices of policing such religious dissimulation should be considered a central aspect of early modern approaches to the problem of religious toleration. Religious dissimulation was a highly controversial practice, and toleration for inward dissent was never a given. Especially in times of political crisis, church and state authorities frequently resorted to aggressive measures to access the secret beliefs of religious dissenters, which belied the Queen’s alleged refusal to make windows into men’s hearts.

Chapter 11 returns to the beginning by revising the arguments on negativity made by Adorno and Agamben, as well as George Spencer Brown’s language of distinctions and of the nothing to help formulate this sense of renewed strategic need for both in-forming and un-informing. It is not much that we offer by way of a way out, but that is the point; it must remain in an uneasy and slightly impoverished space if it is to survive, it is strategy from the shadow.

In this chapter Kinch Hoekstra analyses the particular understanding of time and history characteristic of ‘politic history’, identified by scholars as a distinctive genre in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, where it flourished as a historiographical version of ‘reason of state’. At its heart, Hoekstra argues, was an epistemic question: whether it is possible to derive political lessons from empirical, historical truths. Influenced by Italian discussions of how political knowledge could be drawn from historical experience, politic historians looked in particular to Machiavelli and Guicciardini. It was Philip Sidney, in his Defence of Poetry, who posed the epistemic question most sharply, and Francis Bacon who offered the fullest response. In turn, Hoekstra suggests, a Guicciardinian and Baconian conception of the value of history informs Hobbes’ preface to his translation of Thucydides, whom he famously characterised as ‘the most politique historiographer that ever writ’. Hoekstra ends by rejecting the scholarly consensus that Hobbes’ turn to ‘civil science’ marked his repudiation of a historical politics.

This chapter demonstrates that the affective meanings of sympathy and sympathize persisted during the Caroline period, despite a renewed interest in the quasi-scientific conception of sympathy. The chapter opens with a wide-ranging discussion of Francis Bacon’s Sylva sylvarum (1626), along with other works that debated the magical properties of the weapon-salve – which could allegedly cure wounds without touching them – including William Foster’s Hoplocrisma-spongus (1631) and Robert Fludd’s Doctor Fludds answer unto M. Foster (1631). The chapter argues that several plays from this period offer a highly sceptical response to the weapon-salve, in particular Henry Glapthorne’s The Hollander (1635–6). It then considers the increasing sophistication of conceptions of sympathy in religious discourse, and focuses on Charles Fitzgeffry’s Compassion towards captives (1637), which describes the ‘Sympathy or Compassion’ we should feel for those in bondage in terms that anticipate modern conceptions of empathy. In this way, the Caroline fascination with natural sympathy does not diminish or displace the affective model but rather increases its complexity.

This chapter traces the emergence of experimental philosophy in England from the late 1650s in the precursor groups to the Royal Society and, in particular, in the natural philosophical method of Robert Boyle. It provides a detailed examination of the development of Boyle’s experimental philosophy and an overview of the adoption of experimental philosophy by many virtuosi in the fledgling Royal Society. From there it turns to early opposition to experimental philosophy by the likes of Meric Causabon and Margaret Cavendish, and the application of the methodology in English medicine, particularly amongst the chymical physicians. The next sections of the chapter examine the spread of experimental philosophy to the Continent and its impact on religion. The new approach to natural philosophy was said to have a positive effect on those who practise it, and its principles were soon applied in both natural religion and Christian apologetics. Finally, we turn to the questions of the shifting speculative targets of the experimental philosophers, pointing out that Descartes’ vortex theory came in for particularly harsh criticism, and the conceptual question as to who qualifies as an experimental philosopher.

This chapter discusses the historical origins and emergence of the distinction between experimental philosophy and speculative philosophy. It opens with a summary of certain disciplinary-specific shifts in the late Renaissance that led to an increased appreciation of the value of experiment and observation. It then turns to the crucial traditional distinction between speculative and practical knowledge, which can be traced all the way back to Aristotle and was central to medieval and Renaissance understandings of the disciplines. Traditionally, natural philosophy had been classed as a speculative science, but interesting new approaches can be found in Roger Bacon, in the practice of natural magic, and in mechanics. These developments paved the way for the emergence of Francis Bacon’s division of natural philosophy as having a speculative and a practical, or operative, side. Francis Bacon’s heirs were to embrace his emphasis on the role of experiment in the operative side of natural philosophy, and by the 1660s in England a new form of operative natural philosophy emerged that its practitioners and advocates called experimental philosophy. In many contexts, it was set against the older, speculative approach to natural philosophy.

Two parallel trends prepared scholars for the investigation of the mind–body relationship so that a model of psychological inquiry could evolve. The first trend was methodological, characterized by the triumph of empiricism. Scientific innovations by Francis Bacon and Newton were firmly based on careful observations and quantification of observables. Using inductive methods, moving from observed particulars to cautious generalization, empiricism stood in contrast to the deductive methods of the Scholastic philosophers. The second trend occurred in the attempt to develop conceptions on the nature of humanity and was more a philosophical enterprise. Spinoza taught that mind and body are manifestations of the same unity of the person. Human activity, although unique because of humanity’s higher intellectual powers, is determined by the laws of nature. Descartes stated that the first principle of life is self-awareness of the idea, and all else that we know proceeds from self-reflection. His dualism of the interaction between mind and body distinguishes psychology from physiology. Descartes’ views were developed in the French and British philosophical traditions; Spinoza influenced the German efforts to develop a model of psychology.

This chapter asserts the influence of Francis Bacon’s natural philosophy on the early modern English essay, noting in particular how the Baconian commitment to scientific experiment and empirical investigation informed the work of early essayists such as Robert Boyle, Samuel Hartlib, and William Cornwallis. The author argues that the humanist form of the essay was also harnessed to the practical and utilitarian ends of managed state capitalism, including agriculture and political economy.

This chapter offers a historical introduction to the origins of the essay in sixteenth-century France. It examines the role of memory in the early-modern essay and attempts to identify the mnemonic affordances of the essay form. The author compares the essays of Michel de Montaigne to those of his English successors, Francis Bacon and William Cornwallis.

In Chapter 8 I explore key moments of the reception of Plutarch in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. I look at key aspects of the resonance of Plutarch in the work of Francis Bacon (1561–1626). I also discuss the significance of Philemon Holland’s (1552–1637) translation of Plutarch’s essay “How to Profit from your Enemies.” I show how this essay (which Hobbes read in the original Greek and Latin translations but also consulted in Holland’s version) can shed new light on Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651).

This chapter examines natural philosophy in the early modern period (roughly 1600-1800), focusing on three areas: 1) the so-called mechanisation of nature, which presents a rival understanding of the natural order to that of medieval Aristotelianism; 2), the rise of experiment and laws of nature as tools for the knowledge of nature; 3) the emergence of new theologies of nature and new methods of biblical interpretation, which develop in concert with wider changes in natural philosophy. The chapter demonstrates how early modern thinkers inherit and transform the natural philosophy of the medieval Latin tradition, producing new philosophical and theological accounts of nature that are sufficiently comprehensive to rival the Christian-Aristotelian framework of the Middle Ages.

In “Natural Philosophy,” Mary Thomas Crane charts the early modern movement away from Aristotelian natural philosophy, rooted in a version of nature based on everyday experience, and toward a counterintuitive nature, understood only through mathematics and artificially produced experiments. Examining the works of London-based practitioners of technical and mathematical sciences such as Robert Record, John Dee, Leonard Digges, and William Bourne, as well as natural philosophy’s most strident promoter, Francis Bacon, Crane demonstrates how the new version of nature that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came at the cost of an older, more intuitive understanding. The chapter ends with an analysis of Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a cautionary tale about using natural science to control people and nature.

Taking as its starting point a little-known text by George Buck entitled The Third Universitie (1615) and as its endpoint the early years of the Royal Society, this chapter explores seventeenth-century knowledge exchange, research networks and innovation. What began as a civic challenge to Oxbridge ended in an outward-facing institutional sphere that drew its inspiration, founding figures and key personnel from the archipelagic and colonial contexts within which its pioneering interests developed. The Royal Society’s origins lie in a range of institutions identified by Buck, including Gresham College; in later developments such as the Invisible College and the Hartlib Circle; and in the idea for a directory of expertise, or ‘Office of Address’. Colonial investors and adventurers hard-wired into emerging networks of experts working across collaborative communities of scholar-practitioners ensured the advancement of knowledge was intimately intertwined with political intelligence and economic exploitation. There was no new medicine without frontiers, no new husbandry without fresh fields to plant, and, crucially, no knowledge exchange without satire.