This special issue argues that early modern science is shaped by imaginative engagements with the problem of form. These articles reveal how early modern natural philosophy requires the category of form to define itself and its objects of inquiry. They also illustrate how the language arts and imaginative literature are sites of philosophically consequential formal innovation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Together, these essays assert that the current “return” to form in the literary humanities signals the emergence of a new methodological paradigm in literature/science studies, one that treats form as an ontological as well as an epistemological category. “Introduction: ‘Capturing Proteus’” defines early modern scientific form in terms of the interactions of form and formation. Early modern allusions to the capture and chaining of Proteus reveal that form is a mode of being and a process of becoming that is arrested in moments of knowledge production.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet explores the role of preternatural forces acting through “pressure” of various kinds exerted at a distance by “forms.” For the first several acts of the play, Hamlet investigates whether preternatural agencies of various kinds are able to be discerned, understood, and employed to cause action in the world. Tracing a scale of action that increases from “press” to “strike” and “blast,” the play ultimately gives up on preternatural force and reinstantiates a split between natural and supernatural explanations for events in the world. [“Form” and “pressure” are at the heart of the play’s exploration of whether we can trust what we see, understand what we see, and take meaningful action in the world.]

Using Spenser, Montaigne, and Shakespeare, this essay explores the formal variegation of early modern representations of phantasia (imagination, or fantasy). In different ways, The Faerie Queene, the Essais, and Othello show how literary form provided a means of reviewing premodern cognitive theory—Aristotelian faculty psychology, and the faculty of imagination in particular—in light of early modern epistemologies and epistemes. In these literary treatments of the fantasy, we find allegory fused with anatomy, the essay with the medical case study, the dichotomy of script and performance with that of theory and practice. Individually, these texts offer nuanced insights into mental representation that are inspired by their sixteenth-century moment; collectively, they point to the period’s pluralistic and open-ended assessment of the image-making faculty. The subtle inventiveness of early modern forms of fantasy warrants a reconsideration of the place of Renaissance poetics in the intellectual history of imagination.

This article considers Francis Bacon’s articulations of his new method—especially in the Novum Organum (1620) and Of The Wisdom of Ancients (1609)—alongside Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors (1594) in order to consider their overlapping, though ultimately divergent, epistemological concerns. I contend that both Shakespeare and Francis Bacon appeal to the language of metamorphosis to figure a problem within Aristotelian epistemology: visible appearance doesn’t accurately indicate essence, or a thing’s hidden nature. Yet unlike Bacon’s attempt to rescue the epistemological project by redefining form as a law of operation, Errors prompts us to embrace the ethical possibilities of indeterminacy or confusion such as solidarity or sympathy.

This essay offers an account of practical address as a literary technique that appears across genres and forms in early modern England. Through readings of the poetic forms taken by practical knowledge in The Taming of the Shrew alongside examples of instructional books and lyric poetry, it shows how practical knowledge always hangs on the formal operation of address. Drawing on both the history of science and the poetics of apostrophe, this essay argues that practical address represents a distinct formal type: an utterance oriented toward a reader or listener that purports to transfer knowledge of a method, practical address performs an imaginative act, conjuring an attentive and obedient listener as well as a persona for the speaker (or expert). Yet, these are never simple cases of direct address in the present. Rather than confront its readers directly, practical address imagines them into a future moment of knowing how.

This article studies six orations written by Francis Bacon that were delivered during the Christmas revels of 1594–1595 at Gray’s Inn. Emphasizing the context of these orations, which posit ideas Bacon would later promote in his reforms of natural philosophy, it relates how they were composed as a direct response to “The Night of Errors,” a catastrophic failure of programming in which misrule became outright unruliness. The orations evince how the clumsy events of the festival season inculcated a form of “literacy”—experientia literata—Bacon would later promote in natural philosophers. For Bacon, both experimentation and festivity were organized around experiences of error that resisted resolving into outright failures. Perceiving him attempt to reconcile calls for discipline with an understanding of the epistemological importance of mistakes, the article argues that Bacon’s view of scientific form shares a social history with the active, improvisational habits of revelry. 

In Renaissance botanical natural history, “description” is both art and science, method and form. I trace the use of Ovidian poetry as a descriptive method in Gerard’s Herball and examine, sometimes speculatively, the forms that description could take on its pages. I attend especially to Gerard’s engagement with the myth of Daphne and Apollo, which is so resonant for blazon poetry and botany alike. I do so to test the limits of Ovidian poetry’s use as descriptive natural history in this herbal.

“Seeing the Invisible Under the Microscope: Natural Philosophy and John Donne’s Flea” considers the mythological, poetic, and conceptual categories that influenced what the natural philosopher ostensibly “saw” under the lens. I argue that early microscopic texts, especially Robert Hooke’s Micrographia and Henry Power’s Experimental Philosophy, reveal a surprising indebtedness to fabular, fictional insects. Poetic fleas and their brethren, immortalized by John Donne but ubiquitous in classical and early modern works, were veritable workhouses of erotic, natural philosophical, and metaphysical speculation. Their miniscule size promised access to hidden knowledge, and their uncanny ontology led to analogies with other small entities like atoms and verses. I examine in turn the mutually reinforcing effects of microscopic oculus and poetic microcosm, showing how natural philosophy revels in imagination. These works of microscopy do study nature, but they also cite Donnean seduction poetry, recast insects as romancical characters, and reflect on nothingness.

vIn Paradise Lost, Milton adapts for poetic purposes the theological theories of accommodation, by which God makes himself even slightly understandable to created beings, to make the divine, unfallen, and hellish aspects of the story available to a fallen reader. Particularly potent means of accommodation in the poem are images of writing, by God and his Son, the Word, to create the universe, which occur in parallel to the poem’s own discussion of its status as a written artifact, one that presents a rhetorically successful sensation in readers that they have in fact apprehended the divine. This sensation is similar to contemporaneous developments in mathematics, that sought to find through writing strategies ever more powerful ways to access perfect mathematical objects and concepts. Interpreting these writing events together, the conclusion presents the writing done by Galileo and Christ as indicative of fallen humanity’s best chance to improve itself and regain the promise once held out to its unfallen forebears. 

The presence of the Jutes in the Finnsburg episode of Beowulf is usually ignored or elided. Yet the Danes would not have been able to settle with Finn, nor would he himself have trusted them as much as he apparently did, if he had intentionally and treacherously attacked them, directly violating both kinship and hospitality. The repeated references to the eotena, eotenum “Jutes” in the episode identify the presence of a group of men among Finn’s retainers whose obligations in some feud or quarrel of their own led them to attack the Danes, ultimately dragging both the Frisians and Finn himself into the fight. Although Finn is able to negotiate and settle with the Danes because he did not lead the initial attack, he, along with the Jutes, ultimately has to pay for the slaying of their king, Hnæf, with his own life.

The mass conversion of Jewish children to pigs (the Miracle of the Oven) in the thirteenth-century Middle English Infancy of Jesus Christ, a preface to the Early South English Legendary, reveals Jewish law as a proleptic confession of Jewish animality and consigns Jewish children to a temporal abjection that absorbs the ESEL’s many anxieties about Christian childhood. This abject temporal state, which this essay names the “already/never,” militates against redemptive hope for Jews and justifies the expulsion of Jews not only from Christian England but also from ordinary English Christian time. Simultaneously, in juxtaposing the affective lives of the Holy Family and of Jewish families to demonstrate that Jewish children are ungrievable, the miracle tale poses a genealogy for violence against Jewish children not in the blood libel but in Christ’s own childish violence against his Jewish companions.

Words keep company with other words in dictionaries. But which words have been chosen to describe the Middle English “meek”? Why were these words used and what change and continuities can we see over time? This article investigates definitions for “meek,” and words derived from it, from the earliest mid-fifteenth-century English-­Latin and Latin-English vocabularies, as well as later bilingual and multilingual dictionaries. Because modern western society primarily views meekness in a straightforwardly negative way as a behavior that demonstrates weakness and submission, a study of historical dictionaries helps to unpick meekness’s more complex meanings and in doing so, sheds light on the social, religious, and cultural values of late medieval and early modern England. 

Translation, according to F. O. Matthiessen, was the means whereby “the Renaissance came to England”—with vernacular versions of Greek and Latin books and through the mediation of other European cultures. “Horizontal” translation, however—i.e., in Gianfranco Folena’s definition, translation from contemporary European tongues—was not considered to be as important as its “vertical” counterpart. If there was no doubt that bringing classical antiquity to England was a worthwhile enterprise, the necessity of “Englishing” Italian, French, or Spanish books was not to be taken for granted. Consequently, Thomas Hoby and John Harington attempted to defend their versions of Castiglione’s Cortegiano (1561) and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1591) by appealing to classical sources and authorities. In their paratexts, both translators drew on existing parallels between their source authors and illustrious writers of the past (Cicero for Castiglione, Virgil for Ariosto); and most interestingly, they defended the practice of translating contemporary texts by mentioning various examples of classical translation. The prestige of “vertical” versions was thus exploited to heighten the status of their “horizontal” products—an operation which paradoxically demonstrated the perceived inferiority of modern Europe and its languages to the languages and cultures of antiquity.   

This article examines religious and nationalistic pressures on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editors of Middle English didactic, or exemplary, romances, which survive in multiple and often competing medieval manuscript versions. In editorial methodologies and paratextual commentaries, the editors reveal their anxieties about recovering and transmitting these poems, which render Catholicism attractive in a predominantly Protestant milieu and which only ambiguously confirm a teleological view of Britain’s progress away from its uncivilized past. Editing these texts too accurately posed the risk of undercutting the Protestant faith and the comfortable chestnut of the Middle Ages as barbarous. The British antiquarians’ work is brought into relief by comparing their editions to those of slightly later German philologists. Removed from the demands of British nationalism and apparently less concerned about competing faiths, the German editors produced editions that offer much more straightforward, and more accurate, accounts of the manuscript remains of these poems.

The poem on the front of the eighth-century Franks Casket describes the stranding of the whale whose bone became the casket. The final -u of flodu in this poem puzzles philologists because the Old English masculine noun flod (“flood, sea”) has no declension ending in -u. But if flodu is the weak feminine noun referring to water flowing through a channel, the whale may have been beached by an inflowing river wave similar to a tidal bore. Boats still ride the spring tide upriver to York where the Romans built a seaport fifty miles inland, and Bede likely took this route to visit Bishop Ecgbert in 733. These grammatical and geographical considerations combine to support Ian Wood’s 1990 suggestion that the casket may be a product local to this York-Ripon area of Northumbria.

John Milton composed his Nativity Ode during a period in which the Stuart monarchy was becoming increasingly interested in communicating political peace and power through dazzling works of visual art. I read Milton’s highly wrought early poem as a rebuke to the notion that art, however stylistically or technically perfect, can represent lasting peace. Laying some of the intellectual foundation for Milton’s later challenges to monarchy, the Nativity Ode counters the period’s tendency to conceive of peace as attractive and tranquil.

Though influenced by the classics, Wordsworth sometimes violently rejected the rhetorical tradition. This essay illuminates that contradiction by examining how Wordsworth revises the conventional comparison of rhetoric to the “dress” of thought, declaring this dress a “poisoned” vestment. As customary garb ceded to changeable fashion, clothing came to emblematize a commercial modernity from which Wordsworth sought to extricate poetic language. He identified rhetoric with the changing “dress” of civilization, rejecting it as a socially determined art whose intertwining with historical flux taints the quest after truth. Nevertheless, Wordsworth’s efforts to redefine poetic language draw upon the figures and intellectual habits of the rhetorical tradition, revising rather than abandoning the classics. Through readings of key passages from the 1802 “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, the 1805 Prelude, and the “Essays Upon Epitaphs,” this essay argues that, in rescripting the classical “garment” as a “poisoned” vestment, Wordsworth adapts an ancient figure to the pressing concerns of modernity.

The commentaries of the Cambridge poet-scholar, J. H. Prynne, represent a renovation of commentary as critical practice in English studies. Neither their interdisciplinarity nor their density is unique; critics as different as Erich Auerbach, Giorgio Agamben, Helen Vendler, and Jacques Derrida have shown what can be done with and through commentary. But Prynne’s commentary is of an extreme kind: a radicalized version of close reading that frames the poem as a locus of convergent and contradictory tendencies whose sedimentation supersedes both author and reader. Never has the aesthetic autonomy of the single poem been so challenged than by so intensely focusing on a single poem.