Of Sticks and Stones

On Essays ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 78-96
Author(s):  
Kathryn Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Bodily Experience ◽  
Essay Writing ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Scientific Experiment ◽  
Sticks And Stones ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Scientific Rationalism

In the seventeenth century, the words ‘essay’, ‘experience’, and ‘experiment’ could be synonymous. This chapter explores the relationship between these terms, taking Montaigne, Francis Bacon, and Robert Boyle as key examples. It argues that the essay, throughout its history, asserts the value of experience, rather than metaphysics or abstraction, as the ground of knowledge, and establishes in the seventeenth century a dynamic oscillation between bodily experience, its written transmission, and the experience of reading which is still legible in contemporary essay writing. The relationship between scientific experiment in Bacon and Boyle and the literary form of the essay also suggests that one of the major axes of opposition which defines the essay, in Theodor Adorno’s account—a resistance to scientific rationalism—emerges, paradoxically, from the early essay’s simultaneous concern with experience and experiment.

The Curious Eye

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Webster
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Human Vision ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Johannes Kepler ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Historical Moment

The Curious Eye explores early modern debates over two related questions: what are the limits of human vision, and to what extent can these limits be overcome by technological enhancement? Today, in our everyday lives we rely on optical technology to provide us with information about visually remote spaces even as we question the efficacy and ethics of such pursuits. But the debates surrounding the subject of technologically mediated vision have their roots in a much older literary tradition in which the ability to see beyond the limits of natural human vision is associated with philosophical and spiritual insight as well as social and political control. The Curious Eye provides insight into the subject of optically mediated vision by returning to the literature of the seventeenth century, the historical moment in which human visual capacity in the West was first extended through the application of optical technologies to the eye. Bringing imaginative literary works by Francis Bacon, John Milton, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn together with optical and philosophical treatises by Johannes Kepler, René Descartes, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, The Curious Eye explores the social and intellectual impact of the new optical technologies of the seventeenth century on its literature. At the same time, it demonstrates that social, political, and literary concerns are not peripheral to the optical science of the period but rather an integral part of it, the legacy of which we continue to experience.

‘Finding the Genuine Light of Nature’

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bronwen Price
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Religion And Science ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Significant Figures ◽  
Henry More ◽  
Modes Of Thought ◽  
Physical Phenomena ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Distinct Aspect

This chapter explores four significant figures: Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, Henry More and Anne Conway, each of whom represents an important and distinct aspect of the relationship between religion and science in the early modern period. It considers diverse approaches to questions such as whether matter is connected to spirit and the extent to which the workings and causes of physical phenomena are separate from those of metaphysical design and purpose, thus demonstrating the ways in which theological and scientific concerns are frequently intertwined during this period. However, this chapter examines not only competing modes of thought, but also the interconnections between them. It shows how theories about the relationship between religion and science arose out of a self-conscious response to other voices and were informed by exchange of ideas and open-ended debate.

Marriage and Mourning in Early-Qing Tributes 
to Wives

NAN Nü ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-178
Author(s):  
Allan H. Barr
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Relationship

This paper examines a range of texts from the early Qing period in which husbands pay tribute to their wives, looking closely at three contrasting pairs of cases: works written by An Zhiyuan (1628-1701) and Pu Songling (1640-1715), who enjoyed long and happy marriages, by Chen Gongyin (1631-1700) and Xu Fang (1619-71), associated with the Ming loyalist cause, and by Chen Weisong (1626-82) and Chen Que (1604-77), stricken by guilt over their wives’ untimely deaths. Particular areas of attention include the relationship between an author’s choice of literary form and the effect achieved, and the implications of these texts for an understanding of gender relations in seventeenth-century China.


Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Nuovo
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Repeated Reading ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Natural Philosopher ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Mind

The Introduction outlines the purpose of the book, which is to show how Locke’s philosophical work is clarified and explained when it is considered as the production of a Christian virtuoso—a seventeenth-century English experimental natural philosopher, an empiricist, who also professed Christianity of a sort that was infused with moral seriousness and Platonic otherworldliness, and with the conviction that the material and temporal world is irremediably imperfect and cannot satisfy the desire of the mind to know all things and the will to achieve perfection. The method used in interpreting Locke’s thought involves careful and repeated reading of his whole works in their proper contexts. Those contexts were natural philosophical and biblical theological projects engaged in by Locke’s eminent predecessors, Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle. Bacon is credited with initiating a revival of interest in the Presocratics, especially Democritus and his system of atomism; but this was part of a larger program of the renewal of learning that was deeply influenced by Christian expectation.

Studies in the life of Robert boyle, F. R. S. Part VII. The Grand Tour

1965 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-77 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Grand Tour ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Detailed Consideration ◽  
Future Career ◽  
Foreign Travel ◽  
The World ◽  
Earl Of Essex ◽  
At Home

The seventeenth century saw the beginning of what was to become, for those who could afford it, the popular practice of continental travel. Restricted in the main to members of the nobility or wealthy class, this Grand Tour, as it came later to be called, was regarded as an indispensable part of the education of a gentleman, and essential preparation for his future career. At that time, much was written on the educative value and benefits of foreign travel. There is the letter of 1595 written by the Earl of Essex to the Earl of Rutland (1); there are the long instructions written about 1617-1618 by Henry, Earl of Northumberland, for his son, which commence thus: ‘Yow must consider, the ends of yowr travels is not to learn apishe iestures, or fashions of attyres or varieties of costely meates, but to gayne the tonges, that hereafter at yowr leisures, yow may discours with them that are dead, if they haue left any worth behind them; talke with them that are present, if yow haue occasion; and conferre with them that are absent, if they haue bestowed vpon vs any thing fitt for the view of the world; and soe, by comparing the acts of men abroade with the deeds of them at home, yowr carriage may be made cummely, yowr minde riche, yowr iudgement wyse to chuse that is best, and to eschew that is naught.’ After detailed consideration of matters worthy o f study, the instructions close with the admonition, ‘What yow obserue of worthe, takes notes of; for when yow list to take a reweu, the leues o f yowr books are easylyer turnd ouer, then the leaues of yowr memory’ (2). Francis Bacon in his Essays wrote ‘Of Travel’. James Howell in his Instructions for Forreine Travell regarded ‘the prime use of Peregrination’ to be ‘the study of living men, and a collation of his [the traveller’s] own Optique observations and judgements with’ those of others.

Language Matters: ‘Counsel’ in Early Modern and Modern Medicine

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Sabroe ◽  
Phil Withington
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Successful Scientist

Francis Bacon is famous today as one of the founding fathers of the so-called ‘scientific revolution’ of the seventeenth century. Although not an especially successful scientist himself, he was nevertheless the most eloquent and influential spokesperson for an approach to knowledge that promised to transform human understanding of both humanity and its relationship with the natural and social worlds. The central features of this approach, as they emerged in Bacon’s own writings and the work of his protégés and associates after 1605, are equally well known. They include the importance of experiment, observation, and a sceptical attitude towards inherited wisdom (from the ‘ancients’ in general and Aristotle in particular).

Financial Folly and Spain’s Black Legend

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mauricio Drelichman ◽  
Hans-Joachim Voth
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Military Power ◽  
Great Flexibility ◽  
Loan Contracts ◽  
Historical Tradition ◽  
Black Legend ◽  
Contractual Obligations ◽  
The Relationship

This epilogue argues that Castile was solvent throughout Philip II's reign. A complex web of contractual obligations designed to ensure repayment governed the relationship between the king and his bankers. The same contracts allowed great flexibility for both the Crown and bankers when liquidity was tight. The risk of potential defaults was not a surprise; their likelihood was priced into the loan contracts. As a consequence, virtually every banking family turned a profit over the long term, while the king benefited from their services to run the largest empire that had yet existed. The epilogue then looks at the economic history version of Spain's Black Legend. The economic history version of the Black Legend emerged from a combination of two narratives: a rich historical tradition analyzing the decline of Spain as an economic and military power from the seventeenth century onward, combined with new institutional analysis highlighting the unconstrained power of the monarch.

Muscovy and the Tatars

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 403-431
Author(s):  
Bulat R. Rakhimzianov
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
The Political ◽  
East European ◽  
Central Eurasia ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mutual Relations ◽  
Forest Line ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract This article explores relations between Muscovy and the so-called Later Golden Horde successor states that existed during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries on the territory of Desht-i Qipchaq (the Qipchaq Steppe, a part of the East European steppe bounded roughly by the Oskol and Tobol rivers, the steppe-forest line, and the Caspian and Aral Seas). As a part of, and later a successor to, the Juchid ulus (also known as the Golden Horde), Muscovy adopted a number of its political and social institutions. The most crucial events in the almost six-century-long history of relations between Muscovy and the Tatars (13–18th centuries) were the Mongol invasion of the Northern, Eastern and parts of the Southern Rus’ principalities between 1237 and 1241, and the Muscovite annexation of the Kazan and Astrakhan khanates between 1552 and 1556. According to the model proposed here, the Tatars began as the dominant partner in these mutual relations; however, from the beginning of the seventeenth century this role was gradually inverted. Indicators of a change in the relationship between the Muscovite grand principality and the Golden Horde can be found in the diplomatic contacts between Muscovy and the Tatar khanates. The main goal of the article is to reveal the changing position of Muscovy within the system of the Later Golden Horde successor states. An additional goal is to revisit the role of the Tatar khanates in the political history of Central Eurasia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Francis Bacon and the Origins of Christian Virtuosity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Nuovo
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Natural Philosopher ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
The Mind

Although the vocation of Christian virtuoso was invented and named by Robert Boyle, Francis Bacon provided the archtype. A Christian virtuoso is an experimental natural philosopher who professes Christianity, who endeavors to unite empiricism and supernatural belief in an intellectual life. In his program for the renewal of the learning Bacon prescribed that the empirical study of nature be the basis of all the sciences, including not only the study of physical things, but of human society, and literature. He insisted that natural causes only be used to explain natural events and proposed not to mix theology with natural philosophy. This became a rule of the Royal Society of London, of which Boyle was a principal founder. Bacon’s rule also had a theological use, to preserve the purity and the divine authority of revelation. In the mind of the Christian virtuoso, nature and divine revelation were separate but complementary sources of truth.

Afterword

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Brownlee
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
Departure Point ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Relationship

The recent upturn in biblically based films in Anglophone cinema is the departure point for this Afterword reflecting on the Bible’s impact on popular entertainment and literature in early modern England. Providing a survey of the book’s themes, and drawing together the central arguments, the discussion reminds that literary writers not only read and used the Bible in different ways to different ends, but also imbibed and scrutinized dominant interpretative principles and practices in their work. With this in mind, the Afterword outlines the need for further research into the relationship between biblical readings and literary writings in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe.

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