| Though scholars have long identified the plain style as a consequence of the scientific revolution in early modern England, I find that there is no one plain style. Rather, claims of a plain style repeatedly attempt to authorize discourse and guarantee knowledge claims in the poetry and prose of the seventeenth century. Such debate about form---style talk---occurs when cultural changes require a re-negotiation of decorum and verisimilitude. The multiple versions of the plain style are evidence of competing models of nature in relation to culture. In the seventeenth century, natural philosophy is not yet science. For all its desire to bound the discourse and practice of experiment, seventeenth-century science draws energy from its connections to a wide range of discourses, including rhetoric and poetry. Sir Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica and John Donne's Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions are both responses to one aspect of Francis Bacon's critique of the defects of learning: the idols of the tribe. The rejection of metaphor is not solely the rejection of ornament, but a transformation of patterns of thought. In this context, both texts question whether the traditional metaphor of the microcosm is productive of knowledge. The status of the microcosm was further challenged by the possibility of a plurality of worlds. In Paradise Lost, the other world becomes a figure that preserves choice in the overdetermined narrative of the Fall. Members of the Royal Society had to write into existence the new world of experiment. For them and John Milton, accommodation was a rhetorical strategy that redefined traditional categories of value and of truth. John Dryden's revision of Paradise Lost, The State of Innocence responds to Milton's epic of choice with the constraint of rhyme. Margaret Cavendish's exclusion from the canon of literature and the history of science results not solely from gender, but also from her violation of the emerging conventions of the literary and scientific text. Cavendish's formal experiments, characterized by what she called her "romancical," "philosophical," and "fantastical" Blazing World, provide the grounds for her critique of the social and textual form of experimental natural philosophy. |
