Dark works: Poison and the emerging epistemologies of early modern England

In my dissertation, I explore a span of roughly one hundred years---from the 1540s to the 1640s---in which the idea of poison moves fluidly and rapidly through English culture. I argue that by forcing new interpretations of physical objects and actions, literary depictions of poison and poisoners in the period call into question the means whereby individuals know and understand the world around. Poison's ability to generate epistemological confusion extends from the physical realm of emerging science, through the legal and theological, and into the literary as writers struggle to differentiate between the natural and unnatural, between differences of degree and differences of kind. This project involves works from canonical literary writers, such as Shakespeare, Bacon, Donne, and Spenser, as well as lesser known works produced by doctors, popular pamphlet writers, and writers on the law, theology, and politics. Throughout this project, I am interested in what the threat of poison has to tell us about the costs accrued in the creation and establishment of knowledge. Such as examination is especially important as the interplay between the period's fear of poison and its interest in how we "know what we know" speaks directly to current early modern scholarship on science, objectivity, and the development of legal frameworks.