Experiencing and Responding to Crisis: Layered Discourses and Hybrid Epistemologies in Early Modern English Culture

This chapter explores, with reference to several primary texts, a deep epistemic crisis in English culture of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century and proposes to observe it from the angle of its complex discursive stratifications. In several texts of this period we register a mixture of two or more disciplinary codes, a fact that can be seen both as symptom of crisis and as a strategy of coping with intense cultural conflicts. Textual references to works by Shakespeare, John Donne, Sir Thomas Browne, John Dee, Sir Francis Bacon, Joseph Glanvill, John Wallis, and Robert Boyle are discussed to illustrate the fact that, in this age of profound transitions, mathematicians speak like mystics or divines, scientists like religious authorities and vice versa, rhetoricians like political advisers, and so forth. This intense hybridization of disciplinary codes and perspectives allows us to perceive crisis as a salutary malady of culture, a moment in which new cultural challenges in philosophy, religion, science, and politics were successfully met.