The Invention of Discovery, 15001700 (Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity)

The early modern period used to be known as the Age of Discovery. More recently, it has been troped as an age of invention. But was the invention/discovery binary itself invented, or discovered? This volume investigates the possibility that it was invented, through a range of early modern knowledge practices, centered on the emergence of modern natural science. From Bacon to Galileo, from stagecraft to math, from martyrology to romance, contributors to this interdisciplinary collection examine the period's generation of discovery as an absolute and ostensibly neutral standard of knowledge-production. They further investigate the hermeneutic implications for the epistemological authority that tends, in modernity, still to be based on that standard. "The Invention of Discovery, 1500-1700" is a set of attempts to think back behind discovery, considered as a decisive trope for modern knowledge. Cover......Page 1 Title......Page 4 Copyright......Page 5 Contents......Page 6 Notes on Contributors......Page 8 Acknowledgements......Page 10 Introduction: The Invention of Discovery, 1500-1700......Page 12 "That full-sail voyage": Travel Narratives and Astronomical Discovery in Kepler and Galileo......Page 26 Francis Bacon and the Divine Hierarchy of Nature......Page 40 "Invention" and "Discovery" as Modes of Conceptual Integration: The Case of Thomas Harriot......Page 56 The Undiscoverable Country: Occult Qualities, Scholasticism, and the End of Nescience......Page 72 Spirits, Vitality, and Creation in the Poetics of Tommaso Campanella and John Donne......Page 90 Perfection of the World and Mathematics in Late Sixteenth-Century Copernican Cosmologies......Page 104 Discovery in The World: The Case of Descartes......Page 120 Numbering Martyrs: Numerology, Encyclopedism, and the Invention of Immanent Events in John Foxe's Actes and Monuments......Page 136 Unearthing Radical Reform: Antiquarianism against Discovery......Page 150 The Discovery of Blackness in the Early-Modern Bed-Trick......Page 164 Newness and Discovery in Early-Modern France......Page 178 Afterword: The Art of the Field......Page 192 Bibliography......Page 200 Index......Page 226 From Bacon to Galileo, from stagecraft to maths, from martyrology to romance, contributors to this interdisciplinary collection examine the early-modern generation of discovery as an absolute and ostensibly neutral standard of knowledge-production. They further investigate the hermeneutic implications for the epistemological authority that tends, in modernity, still to be based on that standard.