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1 results

  • Chapter 4 - ‘Those Fruits of Natural knowledge’

  • Elizabeth L. Swann, Durham University
  • Book:
    Taste and Knowledge in Early Modern England
    Published online:
    08 October 2020
    Print publication:
    15 October 2020, pp 144-182

  • Summary

    This chapter investigates taste’s paramount importance to the production and legitimisation of experimental knowledge by early Royal Society members, including Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and Nehemiah Grew. Early scientists attempted to classify the properties of substances by reference to their flavours; in so doing, they aimed to develop medicines and technologies that could return humankind to prelapsarian felicity. Their efforts chime with Royal Society propaganda, which depicts taxonomical tasting as an inversion of Adam and Eve’s catastrophic gustation. Research into taste as a physiological process, however, presented gustation as subjective, disrupting the link between taste and objective knowledge that undergirded this rhetoric.