| The history of science has disregarded the influence of natural history in the development of seventeenth-century epistemologies on the grounds that it does not support the grand narrative of the mechanical, mathematical paradigm shift of the Scientific Revolution. I contend, in contrast, that the Scientific Revolution in England relied upon a rereading of natural history to articulate its revolutionary claims. The new scientists, however, were unable to make a complete break from earlier philosophies of nature.;The dissertation contextualizes early modern natural history by documenting its intellectual origins in emblematic literature and Christian interpretations of nature. The interdependency between the traditions of emblematic poetry, a popular literary form that drew upon Christian and classical interpretations of allegorical figures, and Renaissance natural history shows the influence of literary values on emerging traditions of observation and experiment.;Central to my study is the interpretation of the modern, experimental methodology as a gradual adaptation of sacred exegesis to empirical demands. I argue that this adaptation took place across centuries, not in a single revolutionary paradigm shift. The conversion of sacred readings of nature to secular science made it possible to resolve a prolonged crisis of representation that reached a culmination in the Renaissance. The crisis, centered on the divinity of creation and the limits of human comprehension and representation of God's works, generated a need for experiential evidence in representations of nature. Bacon responded to this crisis with a “scientific typology” (as I call it) that allowed him to assert both the unknowable mystery of God's creation and the possibility of human knowledge. Seventeenth-century scientists, due to their unacknowledged reliance on an emblematic interpretation of nature and Bacon's “scientific typology” to justify their project, clung to a Renaissance world-view despite claims to a revolutionary methodology.;I argue that the division created between the “two cultures” of the humanities and the sciences in the late seventeenth century arose from continued epistemological tensions between the secular and sacred readings of nature. The dissertation concludes with a reading of the current debates between the sciences and humanities as indicative of this continuing tension. |
