The Optics of Virtue in Boyle, Cowley, and Behn

This chapter reads Aphra Behn’s farcical play, The Emperor of the Moon (1687), as a sustained and engaged critique of the figure of the experimentalist ‘virtuoso’ as he is presented in defences of the Royal Society circulating in Restoration London. It begins with a close reading of the language of virtue in a series of Royal Society apologetics before turning to Behn’s play in order to show how Behn exposes the ironies present in the virtuoso’s claim to transcend sensual pleasures in pursuit of intellectual ones when measured against the sexually charged language with which these same self-proclaimed virtuosos describe their own experimental practices. By bringing the conventional controlling father figure of Restoration comedy together with the figure of the virtuoso, Behn’s play reveals the extent to which the latter was dependent upon a gendered rhetoric of voyeurism and visual control. At the same time, she leverages the hypocrisy of the virtuoso’s claims to virtuous viewership in order to question other forms of patriarchal authority over women’s bodies and women’s desires. The chapter concludes with a reading of Behn’s poem ‘On a Juniper Tree’ (1684) as an imaginative work that presents a more ethical model of visual engagement with feminine and natural bodies.

The Physics of Vision in Kepler, Descartes, and Milton

This chapter provides a new intellectual context for John Milton’s treatment of light and vision in Paradise Lost (1667) by locating Milton’s poem within the framework of seventeenth-century optical theory. It does so by examining the parallels and distinctions between the role played by light in Milton’s model of vision and models proposed by Johannes Kepler and René Descartes. The main argument of the chapter is that Milton adopts Kepler’s theory of the retinal image, which posits that the human eye operates according to the mechanical principles of a camera obscura. But where Kepler and Descartes use the analogy of the camera obscura to explain the properties of light as it relates to vision, Milton uses it to express the fragility of vision within this new model. Speaking from a position of blindness, Milton’s narrator explores the theological and epistemological implications of having light at ‘one entrance quite shut out’, thereby being ‘presented with a Universal blanc’ (PL 3.48–50) in the place of the retinal projection screen.

Envisioning Empire in Bacon, Hooke, and Cavendish

This chapter examines Francis Bacon’s fictional ‘new world’ discovery narrative, The New Atlantis (1626), and its influence on Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665) and Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World (1666). It begins by showing how Bacon’s dream of a visually rooted imperial empiricism gives shape to Hooke’s observations, both physical and textual, of the ‘new world’ revealed to him by the technology of the microscope. It then turns to Cavendish’s utopian fiction as another new world narrative in this tradition and argues that in this work Cavendish directly responds to the visually charged imperialistic empiricism of The New Atlantis and Micrographia. Where Bacon and Hooke posit optically enhanced vision as a means through which particular humans could both discover and ‘improve’ nature to meet their own ends, The Blazing World, in keeping with Cavendish’s own vitalist philosophy, celebrates the knowledge of non-human animals and holds out intersubjectivity in place of objectivity as the most fruitful means of engaging both human and non-human nature.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the study by providing an overview of the epistemological, ethical, social, and political issues surrounding the subject of technologically mediated vision in early modern England. It lays out the key optical developments of the period, including the invention of the telescope and the microscope, and provides a brief synopsis of Johannes Kepler’s theory of the retinal image, which over the course of the seventeenth century gradually came to replace older, species-based models of vision. This context having been established, the introduction describes the general contours of the debate surrounding the efficacy and ethics of optical technology in the seventeenth century and identifies and introduces the major works to be discussed in subsequent chapters. It closes with an explanation of the study’s methodological approach, which is to read the texts it includes not only as being about optical devices but also as acting as optical devices—literary lenses that can be used to reveal the hidden motivations, assumptions, and desires present within their words.

Perspective as a Conceptual Tool in Milton and Newton

This chapter reads John Milton’s use of vast shifts in perspective in Paradise Lost (1667) in relation to seventeenth-century developments in the mathematics of infinity and infinitesimals. In a period in which telescopes and microscopes promised to extend the eye’s reach indefinitely, this chapter shows that Milton’s use of the epic simile and Newton’s infinitesimal calculus, first published as an attachment to his optical treatise, Opticks (1704), are related attempts to express concepts that continue to exceed the limits of visual comprehension: the infinitely large, the infinitesimally small, and the paradoxical relationship between the two. The chapter places these two writers’ work within the context of baroque art and architecture, which similarly exploits perspective as a means of expressing the concept of an infinite universe held in tension with the limits of human perception. Ultimately, it argues that by requiring his readers to vacillate between multiple perspectives on the same object, Milton contributes to a broader cultural decentring of the earth-bound human perspective as the standard measure of the universe.

Postscript

…the vilest here excel me, They creep, yet see, I dark in light exposed…. John Milton, Samson Agonistes (1671)1 1John Milton, ‘Samson Agonistes’, Paradise Regained, to which is added Samson Agonistes (London, 1671), ll. 74–5. Regarding the turn in critical science studies to include alongside a Baconian narrative of objective knowledge collection ‘stories that focus on social and political relationships and on ideological desires more than on the progress of reason and the discovery of truth’, Eve Keller has commented that ‘critical valuation of the stories the [Baconian] “fathers” wanted to tell about themselves—valuation, that is, of the stories ...

Language Reform and the Lens of Simile in Experimentalist Texts

This chapter sheds new light on the ‘plain style’ movement associated with the experimental philosophy of England’s Royal Society by demonstrating that our critical understanding of this movement as inherently anti-figurative has been hampered by an anachronistic understanding of how early modern Europeans understood figurative language to function. Drawing upon philosophical and experimentalist writings by Francis Bacon, Thomas Sprat, Robert Boyle, and Robert Hooke, this chapter shows that, rather than being against the use of metaphor and simile outright, experimentalist writers conceived of textual ‘similitudes’ as literary analogues to the mechanical technology of the lens. As such, they, like lenses, could serve both to clarify and to distort the objects they were used to describe and therefore must be carefully chosen and applied. The chapter concludes with an exploration of how readers responded to Hooke’s use of simile in his 1665 treatise on microscopy, Micrographia, by analyzing contemporaneous critiques of his work by Andrew Marvell, Samuel Butler, and Margaret Cavendish that target his literary style in addition—and relation—to his optical science.

Poetry as Optical Technology

This chapter explores the impact of Johannes Kepler’s mechanical model of vision on early modern poetic theory. It begins with an overview of classical visual and optical theory as they relate to Plato’s and Aristotle’s descriptions of poetry as an image-making technology. At the same time, it explains how their poetic theories are in turn connected to a philosophical tradition that associates heightened visual capacity with spiritual insight and intellectual and moral authority. The chapter then moves into an exploration of how early modern poetic theorists both inherited and adapted this existing intellectual tradition in response to the optical and visual theory of the period. By comparing Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poetry (1595) and George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589)—two works that pre-date Kepler’s theory—to later, seventeenth-century works by William Davenant, Thomas Hobbes, and John Dryden, this chapter shows that the changing status of the image in seventeenth-century European culture resulted in a complementary alteration within theories of poetic representation.