Rhetoric, Science, and Magic in Seventeenth-Century England 0813215781, 9780813215785

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Charmed and Plain Tropes
2. Language Reform in the Late Seventeenth Century
3. Natural Magic
4. Demonic Eloquence
5. Meric Casaubon on Rhetorical Enthusiasm
6. John Dryden, New Philosophy, and Rhetoric
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Rhetoric, Science, & Magic in Sevente ent hCent ur y Engl and

)(

R h e tor ic, S cience, & M a g ic i n S even te en t hC en t u r y E ng l a n d Ryan J. Stark

)(

The Catholic Universi t y of Ame rica P ress Washington, D.C.

Copyright © 2009 The Catholic University of America Press All rights reserved The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standards for Information Science—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. ∞ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stark, Ryan J. Rhetoric, science, and magic in seventeenth-century England / Ryan J. Stark. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8132-1578-5 (cloth : alk. paper)  1. English language—Early modern, 1500–1700—Rhetoric.  2. Rhetoric—Philosophy—History— 17th century.  3. Occultism—England—History—17th century.  4. Literature and science—England—History—17th century.  5. English literature— Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism.  I. Title. PE1083.S73 2009 820.9—dc22 2008038128

Contents

)( Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: The New Plainness

1



9

1 Charmed and Plain Tropes

2 Language Reform in the Late Seventeenth Century

47



3 Natural Magic

88



4 Demonic Eloquence

115

5 Meric Casaubon on Rhetorical Enthusiasm

146

6 John Dryden, New Philosophy, and Rhetoric

174

Conclusion: The Importance of Philosophy of Rhetoric

203

Bibliography

209

Index

227

Ack now l edgments

)( I thank my family and friends for their prayers. I also thank David McGonagle, director; Theresa Walker, managing editor; Ellen Coughlin, copyeditor; and C. Jan Swearingen and the anonymous reader for the Catholic University of America Press.

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Rhetoric, Science, & Magic in Sevente ent hCent ur y Engl and

)(

Introduction

T he New Pl ai nness

)( The idea of rhetorical plainness captured the imaginations of experimental philosophers in seventeenthcentury England. Francis Bacon’s attacks on “sweet falling clauses” and Thomas Sprat’s invectives against “swellings of style” are especially quotable, and have been cited often by scholars from R. F. Jones to Ian Robinson as evidence that a new attitude toward style emerged in conjunction with the new science. Still, even Robinson, who acknowledges the scientific influence on the development of modern English writing, cannot reconcile the plain language mandates with the reformers’ own less-than-sparse styles. “The paradox,” Robinson notes, “is that Sprat’s language is itself imaginative and rhetorical,” adding that Sprat denounced “the imagination ..... in a quite strongly imaginative way” with his “anti-rhetorical rhetoric.”1 This problem leads Robinson (and many others) to charge that the new philosophers contradicted them1. Ian Robinson, The Rise and Establishment of Modern English Prose in the Reformation and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 160.

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selves by using metaphorical styles to critique metaphorical styles, or were—to put it bluntly—hypocrites. But the fact that the new philosophers continued to use tropes to denounce tropes is entirely beside the point, I argue. They had no desire to remove figurative language from all discourses, or even scientific discourses, which are packed full of tropes, and not surprisingly so, given that language is tropological by nature. And neither did the experimentalists disparage eloquence, another often-suggested axiom. Rather, they shared antipathy toward occult philosophy and witchcraft. Charmed rhetoric, broadly understood, was the true antithesis of the new plain style.2 Advancers of learning used the idea of plainness in order to distinguish between their non-magical understandings of language and esoteric beliefs held by wizards, witches, theurgists, and other practitioners of mysterious arts, of whom there were many. “Plainness” denoted a lack of enchantment in discourse, not an absence of figuration, and it functioned as a shorthand way of dissociating one’s rhetoric from numinous modes of writing, where style continued to operate as a form of sorcery, where tropes had charm, either naturally or preternaturally imbued. A philosophical idea, not a syntactical one, plainness counteracted the arcane worlds of wonderment and incantation. Once we appreciate this point, the plain language reforms take much clearer shape. They appear not as sentence-level events but instead as ontological events. While reconceptualizing the universe, new philosophers re-envisioned the 2. Most critics assume that the rise of the new plain style in seventeenth-century English rhetoric is a syntactical event, rather than an ontological one. They look in the wrong place for evidence of reform, studying minor shifts in sentence structures, when in fact the focus ought to fall upon a categorical shift in philosophy of style, a movement away from Renaissance enchantment and toward modernity. The major studies with which I am disagreeing include Robinson, The Rise and Establishment of Modern English Prose; Robert Stillman, The New Philosophy and Universal Languages in Seventeenth Century England: Bacon, Hobbes, and Wilkins (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1995); Thomas Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Brian Vickers, In Defense of Rhetoric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Robert Adolph, The Rise of Modern Prose Style (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968); Morris Croll, Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966); R. F. Jones, Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Rise of the Scientific Movement in SeventeenthCentury England, 2nd ed. (St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1961); James Sutherland, On English Prose (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1957).

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very the nature of words and tropes. Or, in other words, they disenchanted language. This paradigm shift from enchantment to plainness, as I am characterizing it, is the most significant linguistic happening in seventeenth-century England, and it ought fundamentally to inform how we discuss the rise of modern English rhetoric. This is a book written in three parts. In the first part, the opening two chapters, I show how new philosophers advanced the idea of rhetorical plainness in order to repudiate magical and mystical theories of eloquence. I begin with Francis Bacon, who juxtaposes the plain tropes of modern science against the occult tropes of Renaissance esoterica, and so establishes the pattern of reform. My story culminates with the Royal Society’s plain language directives, which, following Bacon, target the related idioms of witchcraft and superstition, the root linguistic causes of the period’s tumult, as discerned by most experimentalists. Furthermore, I demonstrate that—in addition to scientists—a variety of other types of writers advocated plainness: poets, preachers, historians, and so forth. The new philosophy of plainness, or what I am also calling the new plain style, was sweeping, and it was profoundly successful, setting the stage in late seventeenth-century England for the advent of the Enlightenment mentality broadly imagined. In the second part, chapters 3 and 4, I delve more deeply into the rhetorical practices of magicians and witches—the primary foils for the rise of modern rhetoric. Perhaps most notably, I show how the experimentalists conflated the discourses of magic and witchcraft, perceiving in both idioms the same infernal impulse to communicate with and command demons. While magicians insisted upon the naturalness of their spells, the scientists perceived only witchery: they identified magicians and other occult philosophers as either explicitly or implicitly covenanting with the Devil, and, by “the Devil,” I mean to suggest the presence of Satan in the most traditional theological sense. Magicians, however, understood the study of the occult in an entirely different way, not as a form of witchcraft but rather as a form of systematic inquiry into nature’s hidden (occult) spiritual properties. But because the scientists won the argument in mainstream intellectual circles, the demonic connotation of “octhe new p l ain ness    3

cult” philosophy persisted, and does persist, causing ambivalence about the term. For my purposes, occult rhetoric and witchcraft are to be treated as separate modes of language, warranting separate chapters, with the former—occult rhetoric—containing within it the practices of natural magicians, Neoplatonists, Rosicrucians, alchemists, astrologers, and theurgists of various sorts, perhaps superstitious practitioners in many instances, but hardly witches. At the same time, we need to remember that modern experimentalists effectively associated natural magic with devilish sorcery, which is precisely why the new scientists were so successful in banishing all magicians to the kingdom of dullness and night, as Pope has it in the Dunciad, or, to recall Tennyson’s emblem of pre-modern England, to the island of savage women and moonlight. Finally, in the third part, chapters 5 and 6, I demonstrate how Meric Casaubon and John Dryden forwarded rhetorical plainness in order to remedy the harms caused by enchanted linguistic practices, of which the English Civil War was the most obvious. Casaubon and Dryden superbly illustrate—as case studies—the spirit of seventeenth-century rhetorical reform. Both writers reconceptualized the very nature of language, disavowing magical and mystical understandings of tropes and advancing a plain philosophy of rhetoric built upon Baconian experimentalism, where tropes function as ornaments used to decorate the ideas themselves. This fundamental breach between language and the world, between verba and res, was made complete in these proto-Enlightenment writers of the late seventeenth century. Casaubon and Dryden participated in creating the dissociation of sensibility that has remained dominant in the rhetorical tradition for more than three centuries, and that has as its primary rhetorical tenet the idea that words and tropes are only material instruments, mere objects, ontologically disconnected from the spiritual world. Where, then, does this account of seventeenth-century rhetorical reform bring us? While I will note implications along the way, I would like here to observe two. First, we discover that rhetoric was more religiously, epistemologically, and metaphysically entangled in early modern life than conventional treatments of the subject sug4   the new p l ain ness

gest. A rhetorical mentality operated at the center of seventeenthcentury thought, I submit, from the argument between magic and science, to discussions of witchcraft and debates about religious war and toleration. Writers on all sides of these controversies stressed rhetorical discernment, because to the astute observer the form of one’s discourse was perhaps the most reliable indicator of the heart’s piety or, alternatively, of demonry. Ben Jonson said famously that “language most shows the man,” and many others have insisted upon some variation of the expression “style makes the man.” While I do not believe that such sentiments are true in the trivial sense of modern fashion, I do imagine that the shape of one’s rhetoric (robustly understood) is a profound indicator of the shape of one’s world, a point that would certainly have rung true for most seventeenth-century intellectuals. If the period’s tenor is to be more fully appreciated and properly understood, then we simply must understand the period’s rhetorical thinking. Secondly, a study of the rise of plainness is also a study of those alternative notions that fell by the wayside, or those ideas that persisted only in the catacombs of modernity. The most important of these Enlightenment rhetorical castoffs—for my purposes—is the fundamental Christian intuition that language is connected to the Word at the beginning of the world. In most forms of Renaissance mysticism and magic, tropes have a spiritual dimension, ontologically speaking. Rhetoric invokes. But this idea is obscured by modernity’s materialization of language, where words and tropes become only cold instruments, mere ornaments, trapping the human voice in the bric-a-brac of the material world. I would, however, warn against accepting such a viewpoint, which has dire consequences, not the least of which is the precept that Spirit is somehow dissociated from daily life and language: God as a clock-maker rather than a personal redeemer, prayer as symbolic rather than constitutive, and so on. These are the pillars of the Enlightenment, and they have always been suspect. And they are under scrutiny now, as contemporary thinkers revisit and reinvent pre-modern concepts of language and existence. Stephen Toulmin has described this activity as “the return to cosmology,” which, as my argument projects, has a the new p l ain ness    5

significant rhetorical component: the return of enchanted rhetoric.3 Just as the decline of magic and mystery is conjoined to the rise of plainness in the seventeenth century, so too is the decline of plainness in current thought conjoined to the rise of a new kind of charm: not the esoteric magic of the Renaissance theurgist, but rather the rhetorical mysticism of the spirited cosmologist, who begins with the always timely precept that the universe is made of words and tropes, that the cosmos itself is rhetorical, sermonic, theatrical (all the world is a stage), and, as Dante and Milton described it, poetic. While completing this book, I came to appreciate several things more deeply, three of which I would like briefly to highlight. First, I am intrigued by how demonry looms in seventeenth-century rhetorical debates. The persistent connection between rhetoric and demonic possession in particular interests me, because I think there is wisdom in this line of inquiry. Evil infects individuals—and congregations of individuals—through nefarious eloquence. Early modern writers were sensitive to this matter, and they were often far more sophisticated about it than we are today. Secondly, I discovered the gravity of Frances Yates’s ingenuity and the profundity of Stuart Clark’s scholarship. While Yates mistakenly blurred the line between occult philosophy and new science, she was right to place interchanges among mystics, magicians, and experimentalists at the crux of seventeenth-century intellectual life. If nonchalant about the world of the preternatural and the supernatural, then researchers are hard-pressed to comprehend the period’s philosophy and rhetoric. Clark makes this point manifestly evident in Thinking with Demons, which is an exceptional book, not only for its erudition, but 3. Toulmin, The Return to Cosmology: Postmodern Science and the Theology of Nature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). On language and the world’s re-enchantment, see Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981); Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: Free Press, 1990). On the related advent of numinous hermeneutics, see Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, and Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). On rhetoric and Christianity beyond modernity, see Rhetorical Invention and Religious Inquiry: New Perspectives, ed. Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), especially the essays of Walter Ong, Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, David Tracy, Walter Jost, Debora Shuger, and Paul Ricoeur. See also John Milbank, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997); Michael Edwards, Towards a Christian Poetics (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1983).

6   the new p l ain ness

also for its unabashedly metaphysical sensibility. Unlike many contemporary scholars, Clark does not shy away from spiritual dimensions and grand ideas, which I attribute to his idealistic tendencies. There are far worse tendencies to have, starting with those of the cynic and the materialist, both of whom seem equally annoyed by edifying philosophy. Finally, on the more recondite topic of methodology, I have come to value the importance of philosophy of rhetoric, which is the title of my conclusion. In order to understand the meaning of a term or phrase, one must understand the worldview in which it operates. Along these Augustinian and Wittgensteinian lines, the same thing should be said about a particular instance of style. In order to comprehend the functioning of a style (e.g., trope, sentence, essay, book), we should set the example against the backdrop of an entire rhetorical paradigm, including most importantly the philosophy of rhetoric informing the way in which any particular stylistic element functions. Put differently, we are challenged to perceive in every aspect of style a broader Weltanschauung. If and when we do, the language reforms in seventeenth-century England become easier to discern for what they are. By setting aside typical concerns over tropes and syntactical configurations, we can apprehend the real target of the plain language advocates, and this is the enchanted Renaissance cosmos in all of its rhetorical mystery and charm.

the new p l ain ness    7

Chapter 1

C h a r med and Pl ai n T ropes

)( Arguments over the new plain style in seventeenthcentury England were about the nature of language and the shape of the cosmos. On the one side, a group of experimentalists advanced the idea of plainness, which they used as a code word to signal a nonenchanted understanding of tropes and, more broadly, a modern worldview. To be rhetorically plain in the experimental sense was to be epistemologically sound, religiously levelheaded (i.e., non-superstitious), and ontologically enlightened, and—moreover—to have all of those other qualities that signaled an unruffled refinement that mystics and sorcerers could never achieve, and would never want to achieve, even if they could. Plainness was a philosophical position, not a syntactical one; it was perhaps the first and most substantial rhetorical tenet of what finally emerged as Enlightenment rationalism. On the other side, in opposition to the new experimentalists, were a collection of magicians, sages, and spiritualists of various sorts, all of whom resisted the precepts of modern scientific rhetoric. They used tropes not as mere instruments 9 

(i.e., words to dress the ideas), but rather as enchanted devices capable of transmogrifying reality and, in certain configurations, transporting audiences into metaphysical states of mind. For most numinous philosophers, rhetorical style still carried the residue of the Word and the Name at the beginning of the world, which gave form to reality itself. In the mysterious rhetoric of the late Renaissance, the canon of style still had a cosmological dimension; it existed in the same category as entelechy, chiromancy, and other theological systems of shape tied inextricably to notions of divine teleology. In its grandest sense, therefore, rhetorical style—whether linguistic, architectural, painterly, etc.—was to be seen as informed by and infused with cosmic purposes and superlunary correspondences. This sublime idea of rhetoric, needless to say, is a world away from the utilitarian concept discovered among the new scientists, but it is nonetheless related. The emergence of the new plain style is inextricably linked to the decline of mystery and magic: the former initiates the latter. Arguments for stylistic plainness are part of a larger conflict between magic and science at the crux of seventeenth-century intellectual life. This conflict provides the most significant broader context for a proper understanding of early modern rhetorical reform, which had very little to do with grammar, aversion to tropes, and so forth. Most discourses (plain and elaborate) contain rhetorical elements of various kinds, an idea not lost upon the new philosophers interested in creating a modern linguistic paradigm based upon learning’s advancements. When seventeenth-century plain language reformers complained about metaphors, for example—and most of them vehemently did—they meant something different from the basic idea of a metaphor. Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous AntiClimacus says that “to understand and to understand” are “different things,” and in a similar fashion, metaphors and metaphors were different things for the experimental philosophers and other language reformers.1 Arguments for a new plain style predicated a shift in worldview behind the use of metaphors, and the use of rhetoric 1. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, trans. Alastair Hannay (New York: Penguin, 1989), 123.

10   Charmed and p l ai n tropes

more broadly. This shift is best characterized as a movement away from charmed conceptions of tropes and toward merely decorative conceptions of tropes. The same sentence, then, in a gestalt-like fashion, might very well take on discordant stylistic connotations, depending upon whether the Weltanschauung informing it is occult or scientific. The idea of rhetoric, in other words, did not for the modern experimentalists possess some essential quality that made it undesirable. In the absence of numinous energies, and in the absence of magical and mystical ways of thinking about language, new philosophers embraced rhetoric. The purpose of this opening chapter is to sketch the rise of the new plain style in seventeenth-century England, beginning with Francis Bacon’s and Daniel Sennert’s arguments against magical language early in the century and concluding with Joseph Glanvill’s critiques of spell casting in the Restoration. I discuss Thomas Browne and Thomas Hobbes as foils for the advancement of learning. Browne espouses an occult philosophy of rhetoric, and so works directly against the precepts of plainness, while Hobbes advances a radically materialistic and cynical philosophy of rhetoric (antioccult, but also anti-experimental), which explains why most new scientists were deeply suspicious of him. My underlying argument is that a philosophical distinction between charmed and plain tropes operates at the core of the period’s rhetorical debates. If we are insensitive to this distinction, the arguments for the new plain style will be impossible to recognize for what they are—that is—repudiations of magical and mystical theories of eloquence.

Francis Bacon’s Most Important Contribution to the Rhetorical Tradition Bacon influenced the rhetorical tradition in many ways. But his most important contribution is quite specific, and this is his devastating critique of magical rhetoric, which foreshadows the Royal Society’s plain language reforms. Bacon is the spiritus rector of the Restoration language reformers, making him a key figure in the most significant rhetorical event in seventeenth-century England. While antioccultism is a theme throughout his works, Bacon argues most coCharmed and p l ai n tropes    11

gently against the worlds of magic and mystery in The Advancement of Learning (1605), where he uses the memorable image of Pygmalion’s frenzy to parody occult philosophies of language. Referring to “the first distemper of learning, when men study words and not matter,” he suggests, The vulgar capacities ..... see learned men’s works like the first letter of a patent, or a limned book, which though it hath large flourishes, yet it is but a letter? It seems to me that Pygmalion’s frenzy is a good emblem or portraiture of this vanity: for words are but the images of matter; and except they have life of reason and invention, to fall in love with them is all one as to fall in love with a picture.2

The image of Pygmalion functions as a shorthand argument against the presuppositions of enchanted rhetoric. For Bacon, magicians “veil over and conceal” the cosmos “by enigmatical writings,” while advancers of learning “despise” such “delicacies and affections [e.g., periaptic letters, charmed phrases] as indeed capable of no divineness.”3 In other words, those who treat letters, words, and tropes as if they contain inherent magical force are either naïve or superstitious (idolatrous), as Bacon compares occult rhetoric to scientific rhetoric. Moreover, types of sentence structures are of little importance in determining a discourse’s viability. The focus here is upon philosophical disposition, not syntax. Bacon disenchants lan2. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. J. Spedding (London, 1854), vol. 2, 52. This is the most significant passage on rhetoric in Bacon’s writings, which is to say that I disagree with the assessments of Sean Patrick O’Rourke et al., “The Most Significant Passage on Rhetoric in the Works of Francis Bacon,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 26 (1996): 31–55. For more on Bacon’s rhetorical theory, see Brian Vickers, “Bacon and Rhetoric,” in The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, ed. Markku Peltonun (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 200–31; Karl Wallace, Francis Bacon on Communication and Rhetoric (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1943). See also Stephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 37–44; Diana Altegoer, Reckoning Words: Baconian Science and the Construction of Truth in English Renaissance Culture (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), 29–75; James Stevens, Francis Bacon and the Style of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). 3. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, 11. On Bacon, magic, and science, see Paolo Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).

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guage in the ontological sense, targeting credulous philosophies of style, all the while downplaying sentence-level issues. There is, of course, an undeniable complication with Bacon’s use of the Pygmalion story. Pygmalion was successful in creating a living statue. As the narrative goes, Aphrodite grants the artist’s wish to bring the dead statue to life—to animate the inanimate forma. In a similar rhetorical fashion, the Renaissance magicians held that their own crafted styles were charmed, and, moreover, possessed the power to transmogrify reality. In brief, many magicians saw themselves as Pygmalions and as Aphrodites. The Pygmalion myth itself would have struck the occult philologists as something more than a pure fable. It was a story rooted in real possibility, just as Renaissance magicians accepted the tales of Orpheus and Amphion as stories rooted in the reality of rhetoric’s power to move the world, literally and figuratively, that is, with figures—using tropes to shape the cosmos. For occult philosophers, certain tropes, arranged properly and spoken forcefully by experts, had the spiritual energy to transmogrify both inanimate and animate objects alike, a tenet of ancient theurgy that found its way into the language sorcery of the Renaissance, and also into the Romantic imagination of Mary Shelley.4 Natural magicians accepted the gist of the Pygmalion story, in other words, and Bacon appears not to appreciate this fact. Using the emblem of Pygmalion, he ironically encourages the magical worldview, all the while attempting to reject it. The same point applies to his famous call for a “sane astrology” in De augmentis scientiarian (i.e., astrologica sana).5 In an effort to reform astrology, he inadvertently prolongs its survival in the academy. Many seventeenth-century astrologers announced that their own systems of judicial divination were reformed systems built upon Bacon’s advancement of learning, 4. While some readers might be frustrated by the conspicuous lack of details concerning the monster’s animation, Shelley provides a provocative clue, a reference to Dr. Frankenstein’s study of Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus, all language magicians of the Renaissance. There is every reason to believe (and no reason not to believe) that the monster’s animation was in part a rhetorical effort. 5. Bacon, De augmentis scientiarum, cited in Don Cameron Allen, Star-Crossed Renaissance: The Quarrel about Astrology and its Influence in England (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1941), 152.

Charmed and p l ai n tropes    13

marking a brief and entirely unsuccessful effort to incorporate new science into a broader astrological worldview. Bacon also undercuts the most prominent charmed trope of Renaissance cosmology, the analogy between the macrocosm and the microcosm, upon which many forms of natural magic depended: The ancient opinion that man was Microcosmus, an abstract or model of the world, hath been fantastically strained by Paracelsus and the alchemists, as if there were to be found in man’s body certain correspondences and parallels, which should have respect to all varieties of things, as stars, planets, minerals, which are extant in the great world.6

Bacon impugns Paracelsian alchemy, but the argument extends far beyond one system of enchantment and into the realm of occult philosophy broadly imagined. For the Renaissance magus, the universe itself was organized around microcosm to macrocosm analogies, starting with the human body’s analogical expression (in miniature) of the cosmic order.7 Additionally, particular parts of the body had 6. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, 42. On Paracelsus, magic, and science, see Allen G. Debus, The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: Dover Publications, 2003); Charles Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance (New York: Karger, 1958). See also Phillip Ball, The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006); Peter Ole Grell, Paracelsus: The Man and His Reputation (Leiden: Brill, 1998). 7. Allen Debus is right to point out that “controversies over natural magic and the truth of the macrocosm-microcosm analogy were [in the Renaissance] as important as the better remembered debates over the acceptance of the heliocentric system or the circulation of the blood” (Man and Nature in the Renaissance [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978], 2). On the rhetorical and ontological nature of the microcosm to macrocosm analogy in the Renaissance, see Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963); Paul Oskar Kristeller, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, trans. Virginia Conant (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943); E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto and Windus, 1943); Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936). On the rhetorical and poetic nature of the analogy, see Don Parry Norford, “Microcosm and Macrocosm in Seventeenth-Century Literature,” Journal of the History of Ideas 38 (1977): 409–28; Kitty Scoular, Natural Magic: Studies in the Presentation of Nature in English Poetry from Spencer to Marvell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963); S. K. Heninger, “The Heart’s Meteors, A Microcosm to Macrocosm Analogy,” Shakespeare Quarterly 7 (1956): 273–75; Joseph Mazzeo, “Universal Analogy and the Culture of the Renaissance,” Journal of the History of Ideas 15 (1954): 299–304; Marjorie Hope Nicolson, The Breaking of the Circle: Studies in the Effect

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specific verisimilitudes, from the affect on one’s face as a meteorological condition in reduced form (e.g., a February face), to the look in one’s eye as a minute indicator of heavenly patterns, “the heavenly Rhetoricke of thine eye,” as Shakespeare has it in Love’s Labour’s Lost (IV.iii 27). Social structures, too, yielded deep analogical relationships: the university as a small universe; the cathedral as a tiny expression of cosmic architecture; the body politic as a demonstration of the human anatomy writ large (e.g., the unruly crowd as a spleen). Moreover, the ability to apprehend correspondences among various tiers of existence allowed magicians to connect with and even harness layers of spiritual energy: for example, Michael among the archangels emanates energy as the sun among the planets, as the heart among the body’s organs, as gold among the minerals, which— as a chain of correspondences—is the first step in an alchemical syllogism addressing various sublunary problems. Bacon, however, is not persuaded. He argues that to inquire about alchemical correspondences and occult verisimilitudes between the human body and the form of “a lion, an oak, of gold, nay of water, of air ..... is a vain pursuit,” which is to say that he discredits the search for enchanted analogies in Renaissance ceremonial magic.8 Instead, he calls for experimental investigations of “voluntary motion,” “gravity and levity,” “heat,” “cold,” and all other “natural” phenomena.9 This is a new language for a new world. Denying the possibility of the charmed conceit as a cosmological architectonic—and so planting the seeds for the decline of metaphysical poetry and theology—Bacon turns his attention to the scientific universe of primary and secondary qualities, setting the stage for Locke’s rather passionless realism. Not everyone, of course, was on board. For instance, Robert Fludd provides in the early seventeenth century a striking alternative to modern cosmology. Using the emblem of a mysterious spiral to illustrate twenty-two levels of existence, he explicates in Macof the “New Science” upon Seventeenth-Century Poetry (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1950). 8. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, 36. 9. Ibid.

Charmed and p l ai n tropes    15

rocosm (1618) a host of cosmic verisimilitudes, extending from the small world of the human form to the large world of the heavens.10 The book, it is fair to say, is entirely of the occult Renaissance cosmos, complete with the charmed microcosm to macrocosm analogy at its core, making it incommensurable with the tenor and the tropes of learning’s advancement.11 And neither do John Donne’s conceits belong to the modern world, though Donne (unlike Fludd) certainly apprehended the fate of the metaphysical cosmos as it buckled under the pressure of the new science: And new philosophy cals all in doubt, The Element of fire is quite put out; The Sunne is lost, and th’earth, and no mans wit Can well direct him where to looke for it And freely men confesse that this world’s spent, When in the Planets, and the Firmament They seeke so many new; they see that this Is crumbled out againe to his Atomis. ’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone; And just supply, and all Relation.                (ll. 205–213)

Donne’s “Anatomy of the World,” or poetic autopsy, is most often read as old-fashioned, at best an indicator of nostalgia and at worst a stubborn renunciation of modernity’s triumph. But Donne is probably not as nostalgic as he is hopeful for a modern philosophy that might overcome the frigidity of atomism.12 What Donne laments is 10. On Fludd’s philosophy and cosmology, see Debus, The Chemical Philosophy, 205– 90; William Huffman, Robert Fludd and the End of the Renaissance (New York: Routledge, 1988); Robert Westman, “Nature, Art, and Psyche: Jung, Pauli, and the Kepler-Fludd Polemic,” in Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, ed. Brian Vickers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 177–230; J. B. Craven, Dr. Robert Fludd (Kirkwall: William Peace and Sons, 1902). 11. The same cannot be said of, for instance, Robert Burton’s rhetoric in the Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), which—like much of the period’s philosophical writing—straddles two worlds, striving toward the modern, but still carrying the residue of Renaissance esoterica. 12. Donne incorporated modern philosophical ideas into his poetic conceits (e.g., magnetism, the compass, the telescope), but even in these endeavors he achieved a kind of mys-

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not scientific advancement per se, but rather some of its gloomy and perhaps unnecessary consequences: the erosion of wonderment, the overconfidence in compartmentalization, and the collapse of spiritual vitality, especially the idea of spiritus mundi—the world soul of Renaissance occultism. In rhetorical terms, too, Donne mourns the loss of spirited language. The “fire” that is “quite put out” has as its linguistic analogue the theurgist’s charms and expiations, which are ever-present in Donne’s rhetoric, but not in the modern world surrounding it.13 Rife with alchemical overtones and periaptic paronomasias, Donne’s poetry is incompatible with Bacon’s rhetorical universe, where tropes are mere ornaments, and where language in general lacks the spark and glimmer of Renaissance enchantment. In Natural History, Bacon confronts once more the “monstrous imagination” of the Renaissance magus, exemplified in this instance by the sorcerer’s vitalistic belief that nature is “one entire perfect living creature” (i.e., spiritus mundi) susceptible to manipulation by occult rhetoric: [Magicians] went further, and held that if the spirit of man (whom they call the microcosm) do give a fit touch to the spirit of the world by strong imaginations and beliefs, it might command nature; for Paracelsus, and some darksome authors of magic, do ascribe to imagination exalted, the power of miracle-working faith. With these vast and bottomless follies men have been (in part) entertained.14

Referring to “darksome authors,” Bacon alludes to writers such as Cornelius Agrippa, John Dee, and Paracelsus, those mysterious spell casters who operate in a murky world where the bottomless pit of folly obscures the light of reason and corrupts the purity of scientific tery beyond the modern scientific purview: “Thy grace may wing me to prevent his [i.e., the Devil’s] art / and Thou like adamant draw mine iron heart” (“Thou hast made me”). 13. On Donne, alchemy, and rhetoric, see Angus Fletcher, “Living Magnets, Paracelsian Corpses, and the Psychology of Grace in Donne’s Religious Verse,” English Literary History 72 (2005): 1–22; Roberta Albrecht, “Alchemical Argumentation and Primordial Fire in Donne’s ‘The Dissolution,’” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 (2005): 95–115; Edgar Hill Duncan, “Donne’s Alchemical Figures,” English Literary History 9 (1942): 257– 85. 14. Bacon, Natural History, in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. J. Spedding, D. D. Heath, and R. L. Ellis (14 vols.; London, 1857–74), vol. 2, 640–41.

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17

rhetoric.15 The practice of magical rhetoric is for Bacon a prime example of language touched by “strong imaginations,” which subverts the proper use of the discipline of rhetoric—to apply “reason to the imagination for the better moving of the will.”16 The magicians, contrarily, apply a monstrous imagination to the rational faculty for the bad moving of the will. These rhetorical acts transform levelheaded people into beasts, as in the case of Circe’s magic, for example, or, as Bacon also intimates, these esoteric rhetorical practices transmogrify levelheaded people into Catholics. Bacon’s negative reference to miracle-working faith is a full-blown Anglican critique of Catholic mysticism, though a cryptic one. For the Catholic Church, and for many evangelicals, miracles continued to exist in the modern era, but for most Anglicans in Bacon’s day, including Bacon, the age of miracles was thought to have ended soon after the age of the apostles. The Church of England held this position on miracles, and, at least officially, the orthodox Anglicans professed it. Claims of the miraculous—especially those coming from the continent—struck the Anglican ear (and many nonconformist ears as well) as evidence of delusion, or, worse yet, demonry. Miracle-working rhetoric is the rhetoric of continental mysticism in this context, which many of the new experimentalists deemed an impediment to learning’s advancement. From a standpoint of belief in the miraculous, it is important to note here that Bacon throws out the baby with the bath water. He disavows not only nefarious forms of rhetorical charming, but also edifying forms of mystical thought. The rejection of the miraculous in particular was a damaging philosophical error, putting English science on a course that culminated finally in deism, the most insidious theological system of the Enlightenment. The ancient story of eloquence’s mysterious origins also falls into disrepute as a consequence of Bacon’s philosophy of rhetoric, and 15. The term “bottomless” also carries with it a demonic connotation. Bacon subtly connects natural magic to witchcraft, which is the commonplace scientific interpretation of the magician’s impulse to manipulate spiritual realms (i.e., the impulse is demonic at heart). 16. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, 64.

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this is no small matter. Cicero gives full expression to the tale in De inventione, where he describes the rhetor-poet as the bringer of human civilization.17 For Cicero, orators were the first leaders to bind untamed humanity together with mystical eloquence, giving shape to the initial towns and cities. Such was the power of rhetoric. Quintilian recounts this story in Institutio oratoria, and Horace reiterates it in Ars poetica. The narrative re-emerges in the prominent rhetorical guidebooks of the English Renaissance. George Puttenham, for example, represents the poet as a principal organizer of human souls and as a champion of civilization: “Poesie was th’originall cause and occasion of their first assemblies, when before the people remained in the woods and mountains, vagrant and dispersed like the wild beasts, lawlesse and naked, or verie ill clad.”18 Orators, however, brought these “savage people to a more civill and orderly life,” a testimony to the power of eloquence.19 Thomas Wilson also includes a version of this story in the preface to The Arte of Rhetorique: “Eloquence first given by God, and after lost by Man, and last repayred by God againe,” where he also apotheosizes the mystical orator.20 In fact, Wilson insists that the conscientious student of rhetoric might be taken for “half a God,” if properly instructed in the art of persuasion, an argument with decidedly theurgical overtones, and one that exists in a different universe than that of the new experimentalism.21 Bacon inherits this widely told narrative of rhetoric’s mysterious and seemingly supernatural origins, but he does not retell it. This is a significant omission, because it signals a fundamental departure from the world of ancient rhetoric. In most classical and Renaissance accounts of rhetoric’s origins, the great orator appears as a mystic or a magician, an individual capable of astounding verbal feats. Such narratives, however, struck the new scientists as tales of either credulity or witchery, instances of preternatural charm17. Cicero, De inventione, trans. William Falconer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938), 1.2.2. 18. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589), 4. See also Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (London, 1560), 23–24. 19. Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 4. 20. Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique, p. A.iir. 21. Ibid., A.iiiv.

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ing that were dressed in the guise of natural magic, but in fact subverted natural law and orthodox theology. That is, the story of rhetoric’s mysterious origins had no positive place in Bacon’s pursuit of proper eloquence, and neither did it resonate in the subsequent experimental-rhetorical movements that took Bacon as a model, most notably, the Royal Society’s plain language reforms.22 The longstanding story of rhetoric’s enchanted origins finally waned in England’s mainstream intellectual circles, precisely because it was too charmed a tale to fit within the confines of the new philosophy of rhetoric.

Daniel Sennert’s Critique of Enchanted Tropes Forwarding Bacon’s advancement of learning, Daniel Sennert attacks magical philosophy in Chymistry Made Easie and Useful (1619), challenging the idea that experimentalists must learn sorcery, astrology, chiromancy, and other hidden arts in order to understand the world.23 By scientific standards, such practices were already becoming relics of a credulous past, and Sennert participates in widening this gap between magical and experimental thinking. Of particular interest to philosophers of rhetoric, he disavows the precepts of occult eloquence, calling into doubt the notion that the force of the “Stars may be brought into Characters,” that a combination of “words and wax” might produce wonders, and, more generally, that “whatsoever a Physician can do by Medicines, may also be done by words.”24 In the realm of Renaissance language magic, properly applied words function as medical cures in the same way that medicine functions as medicine. The distinction between actual medi22. Thomas Blount also appreciated Bacon’s power as an icon. He provides an engraving of Bacon on the front cover of his Academy of Eloquence (London, 1654), which explains in part why it was the most successful rhetorical guidebook of the period. 23. Daniel Sennert, Chymistry Made Easie and Useful (London, 1662), 76. 24. Ibid., 76–78. On alchemy, magic, and science, see Lawrence Principe and William Newman, “Some Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy,” in Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Grafton and William Newman (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 385–433. On Renaissance chemistry and rhetoric, see Jan Golinski, “Chemistry in the Scientific Revolution: Some Problems of Language,” in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 367–96.

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cine and linguistic medicine is tenuous at best in occult philosophy, a place where tropes operate as magical objects capable of healing the spirit and the body, if properly inscribed by an expert magician. Contrarily, language on the new philosopher’s model operates as a nominal system of signs. Or, as Sennert contends, rhetorical configurations lack magical efficacy: “Characters are from the Artificer, and from the Idea in his mind, which cannot work upon external things,” and so “therefore [words] cannot have force from themselves or from the Artificer; of themselves they are nothing but figures.”25 The new chemist rejects the alchemical universe, and this includes the rhetorical dimensions of that universe. Language is a label for ideas in the Chymistry Made Easie, but language does not transmogrify lead into gold, protect one from harm, move stones and forests, as in the case of Orphic theology, or alter reality in other ways by tapping into cosmic spiritual energies (e.g., Renaissance theurgy). “Paracelsus saith that words have a hidden force and virtue,” Sennert observes, but “because he proves it not we ought not to believe it.”26 By modern experimental standards, “words,” Sennert argues, “signifie from a compact and convention of men” and “work no further.”27 This is the most damaging point of critique against magic in his writings, because natural spell casting depends upon a magical philosophy of language, where tropes carry with them cosmic verisimilitudes and prelapsarian essences. Sennert jettisons these fundamental building blocks of natural magic, which leads to a radical dissociation between the magician’s philosophy of rhetoric and the new scientist’s philosophy of rhetoric. Like most experimentalists, Sennert also questions the standard microcosm to macrocosm analogy—the mysterious trope upon which 25. Sennert, Chymistry Made Easie and Useful, 136. Sennert amplifies: “Nor do artificial things act upon natural [things], and change them, or affect them,” because “images or names graven upon Matter, can do nothing of themselves” (136). In other words, he calls into doubt not only the natural magical efficacy of words and tropes, but also the magical efficacy of talismans, amulets, and other charmed objects (e.g., John Dee is said to have used enchanted candlesticks in some of his incantations). 26. Sennert, Chymistry Made Easie and Useful, 135. 27. Ibid.

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astrology and many other forms of Renaissance occultism depended. He uses the alchemist Paracelsus once more as the model: “The whole Philosophy of Paracelsus is built upon the analogy of the great and little World,” which “is extended too large by the Chemysts, because they make not an analogy but an identity, or the same thing.”28 The distinction between analogies and identities is a particularly useful one in this context, provided that we are able to discern exactly what constitutes an identity. What does Sennert mean? “Identity” operates in the Chymistry as something like “magical analogy.” Magical analogy is one of many kinds of identities in occult writing. For the Renaissance magicians, the book of nature is written in charmed metaphors, periaptic metonyms, and “curtains of allegories,” to borrow Donne’s phrase from an expostulation upon God’s numinous rhetoric.29 Sennert apprehends the mysterious nature of analogy in occult philosophy, and he contrasts this magical concept of tropes (i.e., identities) against the mere analogies of new scientists, who interpret tropes to be conventional in nature, rather than magical. Analogy becomes in the experimentalist’s paradigm always a plain trope and never a charmed trope capable of harmonizing cosmic verisimilitudes. The natural magicians, on the contrary, treat analogy itself as an ontological fabric. The book of nature is written in analogies, literally and figuratively (i.e., literally as figuratively).30 Using the categories of analogy and identity, Sennert distinguishes between two ideas about the nature of rhetoric, one enchanted and one experimental, one occult and one skeptical—that is, unbelieving toward the possibility of natural language magic. Both conceptions, however, are decidedly rhetorical. Analogy functions as the key rhetorical figure in both formulations, but the rhetorical worlds in which the trope exists are different in kind. Analogy and analogy are different things. 28. Ibid., 26. 29. Donne, “Expostulation 19,” in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (London, 1624), 481. 30. The rhetorical tradition, however, is not somehow diminished in the context of Renaissance magic, as Vickers assumes (“Analogy versus Identity,” in Occult and Scientific Mentalities, 120). Renato Barilli makes a similar assumption in Rhetoric (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 52–78.

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Witchcraft, importantly, is an entirely separate issue. And like most new philosophers, Sennert takes it quite seriously. For him, the active participation of demons provides the best explanation for how certain tropes and phrases seem to work wonders. Magicians who claim to accomplish marvelous feats through natural means are in Sennert’s book “blasphemous” liars, because true wonders “only belong to the Church.”31 On the contrary, the wonders of successful magicians come from “the Devil,” he insists, not from the inherent power of rhetoric.32 Sennert’s description of how magical language really operates proves indistinguishable from the Puritan demonologist William Perkins’s explanation. In the Discourse on the Damned Art of Witchcraft (1608), Perkins characterizes the “actions, gestures, signs, rites, and ceremonies” of both magicians and witches as “having no power to effect the same”—accomplishing “nothing but bare signification.”33 Discounting the possibility of natural magic, Perkins argues that charms and spells instead operate as “watchword[s] to the devil, to cause him to worke wonders.”34 Sennert agrees. The Devil sometimes intervenes on behalf of sorcerers, but tropes in and of themselves do not cause marvels. The division between natural magic and witchcraft disintegrates in the Chymistry Made Easie, and readers are left only with a preternatural explanation for how effective magic functions. Either tropes have natural magical force, or tropes are mere ornaments. Bacon and Sennert espoused the latter idea, conceptualizing rhetoric as dress for the life of the mind, an adornment rather than a charm. For the modern scientific mentality, all tropes were only tropes. If a particular rhetorical utterance proved astoundingly efficacious, then the new experimentalists assumed that a preternatural intervention of some sort had taken place—an angel’s or a demon’s involvement, for example—but they certainly did not believe in the magician’s mastery of an inherently enchanted vocabulary. 31. Sennert, Chymistry Made Easie and Useful, 80. 32. Ibid., 134. 33. William Perkins, Discourse on the Damned Art of Witchcraft (Cambridge, 1608), 152– 53, 137. 34. Ibid., 130.

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Thomas Browne and Thomas Hobbes on Magical Rhetoric Thomas Browne and Thomas Hobbes were not highly regarded among most new philosophers. While Browne was too occult in his thinking to fit comfortably within the cadres of English experimentalism, Hobbes was far too skeptical, cynical, and materialistic. Given these dissociations, Browne and Hobbes function as useful foils, revealing through contrast additional details about what does and does not constitute a mainstream philosophical attitude toward rhetoric. Browne expresses a magical rhetorical sentiment in Religio Medici (1642), which disqualifies the book from participating in any robust way in the Baconian advancement of learning. Of most interest to philosophers of rhetoric, Browne observes the following about the microcosm to macrocosm analogy: “To call ourselves a Microcosm, or little World, I thought only a pleasant Trope of Rhetorick, till my neer judgment and second thoughts told me there was real truth therein.”35 Critics often describe Browne as a figure on the cusp of two worlds— and rightly so on many topics—but in this instance, Browne wholeheartedly endorses the world of Renaissance magic. Further defending the natural magician against the new experimentalist, Browne adds sarcastically that what scholars do is “philosophy,” while what is learned from the Devil—“magic.”36 For empiricists in the tradition of Bacon and Sennert, demonic spell casting and natural magical spell casting are indistinguishable (i.e., both are demonic—driven by preternatural agents), but Browne maintains a categorical difference between them, insisting upon the viability of natural magic, at least as it relates to the microcosm to macrocosm trope. In other words, Browne accepts the possibility of charmed rhetoric, and this positive attitude toward magic complicates any strong connection between Religio Medici and the new philosophy. C. H. Herford argued at the beginning of the twentieth century that Browne’s “splendor of apparel” kept him out of the Royal Society, a widely shared sentiment that continues to hold sway a century 35. Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (London, 1642), 64. 36. Ibid., 58.

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later.37 Browne’s sympathy for natural magic, however, is considerably more problematic to learning’s advancement than his elaborate sentence structures, of which there are many. Sprat, Wilkins, and other members of the Royal Society did not fret over Browne’s syntax. In terms of overly wrought syntactical splendor, several members of the Royal Society in fact out-Browned Browne, starting with Bishop Clarendon, for instance, who constantly opted for wandering sentences, protracted twists, and ornate turns. What bothered the new philosophers was not Browne’s intricate syntax, but rather his willingness to entertain the idea of rhetorical magic. He accepted the central enchanted metaphor of Renaissance occultism, therefore creating a philosophical-rhetorical incommensurability between himself and the new scientists. A similar point can be made about the young Joseph Glanvill, who also wholeheartedly endorsed the possibility of magical rhetoric in The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), perceiving authenticity in the story about a magician’s enchantment of two students from Oxford.38 Preparing to join the Royal Society, however, Glanvill retracted his earlier position on occult rhetoric and embraced the new plain philosophy of style. Browne provided no such annulment of his microcosm to macrocosm epiphany, perhaps ensuring that he would not receive an invitation to join the Royal Society. Put simply, Browne’s occult philosophy of rhetoric kept him at a distance from the Baconian tradition of new science. Hobbes is another matter entirely. Radical in his rejection of metaphysics and spirituality, and so categorically distinct from mainstream new philosophers, Hobbes nonetheless shares with Bacon and Sennert a basic concern about the vocabularies of magic, working against the sort of epiphany discovered in Browne’s enchanted rhetoric. Hobbes’s anxiety about occult tropes appears most obviously in Leviathan, where he complains about “the use of Metaphors, Tropes, and other Rhetoricall figures, instead of words proper.”39 More specifically, he dismisses “obscure, confused, and 37. C. H. Herford, “Introduction,” Religio Medici (New York: The Pilgrim Press, 1907). 38. Joseph Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing (London, 1661), 198. 39. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. MacPherson (1968; reprint, London: Penguin, 1985), 114.

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ambiguous Expressions [which are often of a mystical nature]” and “all metaphoricall Speech, tending to the stirring up of passions.”40 Hobbes’s critique of figurative language in the Leviathan sounds nearly indistinguishable from future complaints about metaphors by members of the Royal Society: The Light of Human minds is Perspicuous Words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity. Reason is the pace; Encrease of Science, the way; and the Benefit of mankind, the end. On the contrary, Metaphors, and senseless and ambiguous words, are like ignes fatui; and reasoning upon them, is wandering amongst innumerable absurdities; and their end, contention, and sedition, or contempt.41

Like every other critic of metaphors in the seventeenth century, Hobbes uses metaphors to reject metaphors. In this case, he offers a “wandering” analogy, invoking ideas of Daedalus, Odysseus, and monsters, but this metaphor of voyage is hardly the most obvious bit of figuration in Hobbes. He describes the Papacy as “the Ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.”42 We should also keep in mind that Leviathan itself is a metaphor. Hobbes obviously does not renounce the idea of the metaphor. Rather, he disavows the language of magic and mystery, all in an effort to purge the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of its numinous glow, or what he describes in another metaphorical phrase as the false fire of mystical rhetoric, which he erroneously blames for the social discord of the age. Hobbes distances himself only from certain types of tropes, not from the general idea of tropology. Mystical and magical philosophies of rhetoric are his real targets. By Hobbes’s skeptical standards, a massive volume of senseless language persists in the vocabularies of wonderment. This includes for him the rhetoric of mainstream religion, which speaks to a rigid distinction between Hobbes and the Baconian new philosophers, including most members of the Royal Society. While Browne is too mystical and magical 40. Ibid., 305. 42. Ibid., 712.

41. Ibid., 116–17.

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to fit within the precepts of the plain language reforms, Hobbes, in the opposite direction, is far too skeptical and materialistic. Unlike the new experimentalists’ criticisms of charmed rhetoric, which attempt to preserve meaningful theological vocabularies, just not natural magical ones, Hobbes’s rejection of mystical and magical rhetoric is thoroughgoing in Leviathan. For Hobbes, ambiguous expressions also include theological-scientific ideas such as spirit, soul, angel, and supernatural. Rather than clarifying the realities invoked by theological discourses, as most seventeenth-century experimentalists attempt, Hobbes renounces such spiritual terminology. This anti-spiritual theme becomes especially clear in his commentary upon rhetoric and demonic possession: “That there were many Daemoniaques in the Primitive Church, and few Madmen, and other such singular diseases; where as in these times we hear of, and see many Madmen, and few Daemoniaques, proceeds not from the change of Nature; but of names.”43 Hobbes sounds as skeptical as any philosopher of his period could sound, implying in this case that demonic possession is entirely a matter of deciding upon terminology. This attitude not only sets Hobbes against occult philologists, but it also sets him against a vast majority of the new scientists, including Bacon, who remained entirely non-skeptical on the topic of witchcraft and other preternatural rhetorical activities. One of those wits from whom mainstream new philosophers distanced themselves, Hobbes never received an invitation to join the Royal Society, in large part because his brand of materialism and skepticism went too far down the road of disbelief. Hobbes questioned both the magic of the Renaissance sorcerer and the faith of the new natural philosopher, the “physico-theologian,” to use a term that Walter Charleton explicated.44 By all appearances, Hobbes renounced spirituality broadly imagined, embracing instead 43. Ibid., 664. 44. Charleton, The Darkness of Atheism Dispelled by the Light of Nature, A PhysicoTheologicall Treatise (London, 1652). On seventeenth-century physico-theology, see Peter Harrison, “Physico-Theology and the Mixed Sciences: The Role of Theology in Early Modern Natural Philosophy,” in The Science of Nature in the Seventeenth Century: Patterns of Change in Early Modern Natural Philosophy, ed. Peter Anstey and John Schuster (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 165–243.

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vulgar Epicureanism, which makes his philosophy of rhetoric a bit more difficult to locate in the standard rhetorical debates of the period. Although his critique of ancient superstitions had a strong influence on the Royal Society, he is best seen not as a precursor to the Royal Society’s plain language program, but rather as a precursor to David Hume’s drastic skepticism. Hume contrived numerous acrid arguments against religious truths and tropes, but it is fair to say that Hobbes anticipated his project in several ways, especially on the level of philosophy of rhetoric. It is worth noting as well that Hobbes misunderstood (or at least mischaracterized) the spiritual tenor of his moment. His assessment that ideas of demonic possession had abated in his own age is utterly absurd, given the sheer number of witchcraft trials and discussions about contemporary cases of demonry occurring throughout the seventeenth century, and also given the status of possession on the continent and in England. There still existed in Rome a ministry of exorcists much larger and better known than the current one, though exorcism rituals are on the rise again in Europe and America. While it is true that the Anglican Church terminated its office of exorcism in 1550, this termination did very little, if anything, to curb the belief in demonic possession. Additionally, new scientists themselves investigated prerogative cases of possession with great curiosity, and without skepticism, well into the eighteenth century, often coming to less than skeptical conclusions. William Whiston, the successor of Newton in the Lucasian chair of mathematics, for example, perceived demonic possession as a normal event in the world, in the same way that gravity was a normal event. He notes in 1737 that demonic activities are “no more to be denied, because we cannot, at present, give a direct solution of them, than are Mr. Boyle’s experiments about the elasticity of the air; or Sir Isaac Newton’s demonstrations about the power of gravity, are to be denied, because neither of them are to be solved by mechanical causes.”45 Unfortunately, Whiston’s deliberation is not as well known as Newton’s legendary reflection upon the falling apple. 45. William Whiston, An Account of the Daemoniacks, and of the Power of Casting Out Daemons (London, 1737), 74.

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Browne also defended the reality of demonic possession. Moreover, he did so in a way that made sense to a large majority of the intellectuals at the time: “The devil doth really possess some men; the spirit of melancholy others; the spirit of delusion others.”46 Browne’s taxonomical explanation was far more common than Hobbes’s skeptical one, which is to say that Hobbes was among a very small minority in his rejection of demonic possession, spiritual causation, preternatural rhetoric, and other related matters. His brand of materialism nonetheless concerned most new philosophers because it represented one possible avenue down which the increasingly mechanical philosophy might move. Perhaps the new philosophers who opposed Hobbes had an intuition. The path of crude mechanicalism is precisely the path that mainstream English science took in the eighteenth century, especially at the height of the Enlightenment, when deism, sadducism, and other forms of cosmology took root as appropriate methodological starting points for scientific inquiry. Most new philosophers saw in Hobbes the final consequence of denying spiritual causes, that is, a disturbing form of sadducism that slips into atheism. In Sadducismus triumphatus (1681), Glanvill directs precisely this charge against “those Hobbesians” who slight Religion and the Scriptures, because there is such express mention of Spirits and Angels in them, things that their dull Souls are so inclinable to conceive to be impossible; I look upon it as a special piece of Providence that there are ever and anon such fresh examples of Apparitions and Witchcrafts as may rub up and awaken their benummed and lethargick Mindes into a suspicion at least, if not assurance that there are other intelligent Beings besides those that are clad in heavy Earth or Clay.47

Nearly every member of the Royal Society agreed with Glanvill on this point. The disagreement between mainstream experimentalists and Hobbes was about what constituted superstitious behavior: belief in angels and devils was certainly not taken as superstitious among the new scientists. By denying the preternatural and the su46. Browne, Religio Medici, 57. 47. Glanvill, Sadducismus triumphatus (London, 1681), 16.

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pernatural, Hobbes became paradigmatic of the skeptic of all metaphysics, and of all spiritual rhetoric contained therein. As such, he functioned as a morality tale in the context of mainstream science, illustrating how disbelief toward wonderment, divine and demonic, soon turned into mordant materialism. Despite Hobbes’s negative remarks about mystical and magical rhetoric, however, he does not repudiate the rhetorical tradition, and this point is significant, because it further circumvents any perception that Hobbes is somehow suspicious of metaphors in and of themselves. The use of tropes is fine for Hobbes, but spell casting is not, and neither are the edifying mysticisms of Christian thought. The best evidence that Hobbes endorses a form of traditional rhetoric is his translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric (1637), the first English version of the text. “Translation” overestimates what Hobbes achieves in certain parts of the book, where he takes great liberty to summarize and omit. He values the logical dimension of Aristotle’s Rhetoric more than other aspects. This explains why he destroys Aristotle’s discussion of the rhetorical enthymeme, for instance, editing it to the point of unintelligibility—not that Aristotle’s enthymeme was terribly intelligible in the first place.48 Nevertheless, that Hobbes saw the value of classical rhetoric is undeniable, which inspires him to make such rhetorical knowledge accessible to a wider audience. What he did not acknowledge was the value of certain kinds of tropes, occult metaphors and mystical conceits, which for him were symptomatic of delusional philosophies of language and dangerous systems of order.

Rhetorical Reform in Joseph Glanvill’s Scepsis scientifica After becoming a member of the Royal Society in 1665, Joseph Glanvill devoted much of his career to promoting new science. He forwarded the advancement of learning initiated by Bacon, Sennert, and others, and this included the advancement of plain rhetoric, 48. Hobbes, A Briefe of the Art of Rhetoric (London: 1637), 124–40. On Hobbes and rhetoric, see Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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which he juxtaposed against the discourses of mystery and charm. Thus, Glanvill’s arguments further reveal the philosophical tenor of the period’s rhetorical reforms. He is in many respects emblematic of the late seventeenth-century experimentalists, who, at the dawn of the Enlightenment, set out to dispel the enchanted idioms of the Renaissance. Glanvill addresses rhetorical issues in several books over the span of many years, but perhaps the most intriguing episode—and the one most often discussed among those interested in rhetoric— is his writing and then rewriting of The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661). Glanvill originally composes the work in order to challenge old superstitions and to celebrate experimental science. In the second edition, Scepsis scientifica (1665), however, he famously rejects his own previous rhetorical style, explaining that he writes the new version with “a Natural and unaffected Eloquence.”49 His aim is to assure members of the newly formed Royal Society that he now avoids “the musick and curiosity of fine Metaphors and dancing periods,” which presumably mar the Vanity.50 Glanvill makes these claims in a polemical essay, “An Address to the Royal Society,” attached as a preface to Scepsis scientifica. In it, he praises the idea of plain language and more generally applauds the Royal Society’s role in cultivating knowledge, all the while distancing himself from the intellectual aura of his earlier work. For many critics, Glanvill’s Scepsis scientifica functions as an important piece of evidence of rhetorical reform, a metonym standing in for the major stylistic shift of the 1660s.51 Nearly every scholar who comments substantially upon the era’s rhetoric provides a theory of Glanvill’s revisions.52 He plays a key role in defining the new 49. Glanvill, Scepsis scientifica (London, 1665), C4. 50. Ibid. 51. This started in the twentieth century with Ferris Greenslet. See Greenslet, Joseph Glanvill: A Study in English Thought and Letters of the Seventeenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1900), 199. 52. Glanvill’s revisions of the Vanity (Scepsis scientifica in 1665 and Essays on Several Important Subjects in Philosophy and Religion in 1676) serve as a vital point of disagreement in the Richard F. Jones–Morris Croll controversy, which continues to shape discussions of seventeenth-century rhetoric. Jones contends that “a comparison” of the revisions “with the first version affords nothing short of a revelation,” because the older Glanvill

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plain style, the prime mobile of rhetorical reform, and he also plays a central role in defining those troublesome styles against which the new philosophers respond, including his own self-confessed credulity in the Vanity. But, given the avalanche of metaphorical and rhythmic language conspicuous in Scepsis scientifica, Glanvill’s rejection of his own previous “fine metaphors” and “dancing periods” seems problematic at best. At worst, he appears to contradict himself, a point that has not gone unnoticed. What does Glanvill reject when he rejects his earlier rhetoric, assuming that he does not critique metaphors, an assumption we can safely make, due to his continued use of metaphors? The brief answer is magical rhetoric. In order to understand the paradigm shift between the Vanity and Scepsis scientifica, we should read Glanvill’s revision as ontological in nature, rather than syntactical, and as focused primarily upon the distinction between occult and scientific attitudes toward the nature of tropes. Sentencelevel issues are of comparatively minor importance. We should ask philosophical questions, in other words, rather than syntactical ones.53 And when we approach Glanvill from the standpoint of philosophy of style, one especially considerable rejected Renaissance eloquence and embraced modern utilitarian rhetoric (“Science and English Prose Style in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century,” PMLA 45 [1930]: 992–1009). On the contrary, Croll sees in Scepsis scientifica only the refinement of a Senecan style that dominates the entire century, including Glanvill’s earlier prose (“Review of R. F. Jones’s ‘Science and English Prose Style,’” in Seventeenth-Century Prose: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Stanley Fish [New York: Oxford University Press, 1971], 91–92). For a thorough defense of Croll’s thesis, see George Williamson, The Senecan Amble: Prose from Bacon to Collier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). In short, Glanvill alters his syntax in Scepsis scientifica, and Jones and Croll recognize this alteration as important, but they describe it in contradictory ways. The shared evidence provides no solution whatsoever. Nonetheless, their arguments operate from a common assumption, namely, that we should approach seventeenth-century rhetorical reform from a syntactical standpoint. In order to achieve a rich understanding of reform, however, we need to move beyond sentence-level issues, because it is precisely the conflicting interpretation of syntax that continues to lead to the impasse between those sympathetic to aspects of Jones’s thesis (e.g., Stanley Fish, Hans Aarsleff, Ian Robinson, Debora Shuger) and those sympathetic to aspects of Croll’s thesis (e.g., Brian Vickers, Kenneth Graham). 53. A particular example of style has clear meaning only when examined against the backdrop of an entire Weltanschauung; this is a recognizable Wittgensteinian claim, but it also has deep roots in On Christian Doctrine, where Augustine emphasizes the importance of philosophical framework in determining a writing style’s overall piety, or demonry, as the case might be (On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson [New York: The Library of the Liberal Arts, 1958], 34–78).

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change occurs between the Vanity and Scepsis scientifica. This alteration has little to do with the reduction of metaphors or the streamlining of syntax, which might or might not indicate a shift in rhetorical mentality. Glanvill’s major revision in Scepsis scientifica is the exclusion of a story that he relates with enthusiasm in the Vanity. The narrative involves a magician who uses his occult imagination to bind an audience. The young Glanvill recounts this enchanted tale with much sincerity. He believes it, endorsing the idea of natural magical rhetoric. Of great consequence to the development of Glanvill’s attitude toward rhetoric, he omits the narrative in Scepsis scientifica, and this omission is crucial to understanding Glanvill’s revisions, far more important than sentence-level changes. Glanvill tells the story near the end of the Vanity. A student at the “University of Oxford” is “forc’d” to leave due to “poverty,” at which time he joins a group of traveling “gypsies” and begins to study the occult.54 Two of his classmates recognize him a few years later, pull him aside, and inquire about his esoteric lifestyle. The magician responds by claiming to have knowledge of an amazing sort—how to “do wonders by the power of the Imagination.”55 Intrigued by the claim, the former classmates want proof, which the sorcerer duly presents: To evince the truth of what he told them, he said, he’d remove into another room, leaving them to discourse together; and upon his return tell them the sum of what they had talked of: which accordingly he performed, giving them a full account of what had passed between them in his absence. The scholars being amaz’d at so unexpected a discovery, defied him to unriddle the mystery. In which he gave them satisfaction, by telling them, that what he did was by the power of Imagination, his Phancy binding theirs.56

The magician insists that he “had dictated to them the discourse, they held together, while he was from them. That there were warrantable wayes of heightening the Imagination, to that pitch, as to bind others.”57 In other words, the magician claims to have performed a rhetorical incantation in the adjacent room, persuading 54. Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing, 196. 55. Ibid., 197. 56. Ibid., 198. 57. Ibid.

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the mental faculties of the two students from Oxford, an act of psychokinetic nudging and charming. Glanvill invokes the world of Renaissance magic with this story. And not only does he invoke it, but he also unabashedly endorses it: “This strange power of the Imagination is no Impossibility,” he argues, suggesting furthermore that “sympathies” and “fascinations” among people account for how the rhetorical imagination works.58 Glanvill accepts the reality of magical rhetoric, which functions as a type of organic enchantment, or what Glanvill describes literally as a pitch that binds the fancy, an explanation that calls to mind the ancient charms of Orpheus and Amphion. Interestingly, too, Glanvill’s story bears some resemblance to a narrative told by the anonymous writer of the Rosicrucian Fama and Confessio (1652), a book translated into English a few years before Glanvill composed the Vanity. The Rosicrucian author tells the story of a young scholar who leaves school for lack of money and consequently seeks out knowledge in unconventional places, discovering secrets while living with a clandestine society of magicians. The tale about the magician in the Vanity is difficult to distinguish from the Rosicrucian account, and the similarity between the two is enough to cause speculation about Glanvill’s connection to the Rosicrucians. Does the young Glanvill dabble in Rosicrucian philosophy? Probably. At the very least, he believes in the occult power of the rhetorical imagination. The young Glanvill therefore works against Bacon’s philosophy of rhetoric, and herein we discover the deeper reason why the older Glanvill rejects the “musick and curiosity of [his own previous] fine Metaphors and dancing periods.” Such music undoubtedly carries with it occult qualities. Using the story of the magician, the young Glanvill conceptualizes the rhetorical imagination as capable of wizardry. Or, to use a more disturbing image, he conceptualizes it as having a Circe-like power to bind audiences. An open-minded philosopher, Glanvill entertains the possibility of organic spell casting, lending credence to the world of enchanted eloquence—a possibility he would later be less willing to entertain. 58. Ibid.

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The story of the magician disappears from Scepsis scientifica. There is every reason to believe that the older Glanvill continued to accept the testimony of what happened between the sorcerer and the two students from Oxford. The point is that he most certainly changed his explanation of how it happened. In the context of Glanvill’s newly formed experimentalism, the case of the magician becomes an instance of witchery, a narrative suitable for Sadducismus triumphatus, for example, or one of his other explorations of the demonic. By excluding the story of the magician from Scepsis scientifica, Glanvill in one swift gesture repudiates the idea of natural magical rhetoric. The mysterious narrative contradicts the presuppositions of the new plainness, and so he erases it. This change is the most important rhetorical difference between the first and subsequent editions of the Vanity. In fact, too much has been made of the syntactical shifts in Glanvill’s revisions. If taken alone, revisions of syntax tell us very little. There can be no mistake, however, about Glanvill’s omission of what appears as a youthful acknowledgement of spell casting, a moment of Renaissance enchantment from which the older and more skeptical Glanvill distances himself. My argument is not that we should ignore the multitude of syntactical changes that occur between the first and subsequent editions of the Vanity. Rather, the point is that these sentence-level changes say very little about the emergence of Glanvill’s modern mentality. Readers need a sense of his shifting philosophy of style, in addition to a sense of his syntactical alterations, in order properly to understand Glanvill’s repudiation of his earlier position. If we approach his writing style with philosophical categories, then certain moments of syntax and figuration become more interesting than other moments. Glanvill, for example, begins the Vanity with a lengthy discussion about Adam’s prelapsarian state of mind, and, among other things, he argues, “while man knew no sin, he was ignorant of nothing else, that it imported humanity to know.”59 Stephen Medcalf notices the poetic nature of the phrasing in this sentence, suggesting that the point of the sentence is a piece of metaphysical pun59. Ibid., 11.

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ning on knowing sin and knowing fact.60 Glanvill plays on words in order to explain the purity of knowledge experienced by Adam and Eve. This includes the knowledge of knowing no sin, which is the positive knowledge of purity. Glanvill’s playfulness creates enchantment in the passage. He pines for Shakespeare at this moment, or Donne. In the world of metaphysical philology, his “know” and “no” also take on mystical layers of meaning, recalling labyrinthine medieval debates about negative capability, the nature of sin, the status of prelapsarian epistemology, and other realms of theological complexity. Such lively language is far removed from the less ingenious, more restrained mood of Scepsis scientifica, which is perhaps why Medcalf detects the sentence’s charm. Not surprisingly, Glanvill leaves out the occult paronomasia in Scepsis scientifica, though he preserves the general idea of the passage. The new version reads as follows: “While man was innocent, he was likely ignorant of nothing, that it imported humanity to know.”61 This is a significant rhetorical change, because the change is not merely an alternation of syntax. Rather, it is a reconsideration of the very rhetorical universe at work in the text. In the first version, Glanvill uses paronomasia in order to participate in a numinous cosmos where language reverberates with meaning and sense. He enacts the mystery of a resonant universe. By dropping the word play in Scepsis scientifica, he erases this mystical-verbal dimension of the passage. The second version preserves the basic concept—that prelapsarian humanity was ignorant of nothing—but the linguistic enchantment is gone. From a philosophical-rhetorical standpoint, a world of charm gives way to a world of mere words. Other changes in syntax between the Vanity and the subsequent versions are just as illuminating. In the Vanity, Glanvill uses the cumbersome and somewhat peculiar phrase “aqueous Crystal.”62 In Scepsis scientifica, he says “Ice.”63 This example could involve a moment of 60. Stephen Medcalf, The Vanity of Dogmatizing: The Three Versions (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1970), xxxvii–xxxviii. 61. Glanvill, Scepsis scientifica (London, 1665), 4. 62. Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing, 47. 63. Glanvill, Scepsis scientifica, 11.

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affected language. As a phrase, “aqueous Crystal” sounds grandiose. Maybe it is grandiose, but I doubt it, especially when set against the backdrop of the Vanity’s other occult tendencies. The phrase “aqueous Crystal” carries at least the hint of alchemy and magic. The crystalline shape evokes the Renaissance scrying stone (e.g., John Dee’s famous scrying stone, or the Red Cross Knight’s crystalline shield, a much larger version of the scrying stone). By implication, the shape also recalls the mysterious world in which scrying stones function. The likelihood of glimpsing a spirit through aqueous crystal is much higher than the likelihood of glimpsing a spirit through ice. By substituting “ice” for “aqueous Crystal,” Glanvill might very well be reimagining the entire cosmos.64 Again, however, such a claim about this slight revision can be substantiated only if one involves the overall philosophical-rhetorical gestalt of the text. Philosophy of style gives meaning to the particular bit of terminology, and to its alteration. Other passages reveal the same type of complexity. For example, Glanvill refers to the “placets of destiny” in the Vanity.65 By the time he writes Essays on Several Important Subjects in Philosophy and Religion (1676), the phrase has become “the effects of Destiny.”66 This is an interesting shift, and it hints at a change in how the older Glanvill imagines cause-and-effect relationships. The latter language reverberates more cogently in a modern experimental universe, or even a mechanical universe. “Placets” invokes a different ontology than “effects.” The former phrase speaks to a world governed less by the theories of material dynamics and more by the tenets of theological science. Both expressions, however, remain figurative, that is, figured, given the prosopopia of destiny. In other words, it is not a lack of tropology that marks the difference between the first and later versions of the Vanity. Rather, it is a shift in the nature of the figurative. The phrase “effects of Destiny” operates more clearly within an ex64. Johannes Kepler’s mystical speculations about snowflakes also linger in the background of Glanvill’s phrasing—however remotely. Kepler found in the crystalline shape of the snow one more example of cosmic harmony, those intelligent designs instantiated in God’s creation. See Kepler, The Six-Cornered Snowflake (Prague, 1611). 65. Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing, 129. 66. Glanvill, Essays on Several Important Subjects in Philosophy and Religion (London, 1676), 24.

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perimental worldview, where an emphasis upon mechanical philosophy comes to the forefront. As a phrase, “effects of Destiny” is colder; it lacks the warmth embedded in a world built upon God’s placets. While discussing how spirit interacts with matter, Glanvill observes with some skepticism in the Vanity that “how the purer Spirit” is “united to this clod” is a difficult “knot” for the human mind to “untye.”67 He uses a vivid metaphor to describe a problem, showing a proclivity for lively ekphrasis. In Essays, Glanvill changes the phrasing dramatically, observing that how the “Spirit” connects to the material world is “beyond the reach of any of our faculties.”68 In this instance, Glanvill replaces a vibrant metaphor with a more abstract metaphor—an illustration involving the mind’s reaching. He alters the sensibility of the sentence, draining it of its literary energy. In this way, the older Glanvill sounds more like Locke than the younger Glanvill, but this is not necessarily an interesting observation. Elias Ashmole sounds like Locke at times, and no one would accuse him of embracing the modern world. The second metaphor, one of reaching and grasping, creates the same gist as the first metaphor, and so the subtle shift in phrasing and syntax might be one of taste, or small nuance, but not worldview. Many other shifts in Scepsis scientifica function in a similar way, and there are numerous modifications to consider. Glanvill revises language on nearly every page of the book. Some of his syntactical alterations should therefore be taken as a normal activity, an expected refinement that comes through rewriting an earlier work. Other changes are more important. If taken alone, however, none of these shifts in syntax and terminology says very much about the state of Glanvill’s cosmos. This is the primary point. If we examine sentence-level changes without an overall sense of Glanvill’s philosophy of style, we are hard-pressed to make any sort of strong claim about his linguistic modifications. Medcalf examines many of Glanvill’s syntactical shifts and concludes that “two epochs and two extremes of the human mind overlap in the three books: roughly, the end of the scholastic era with the beginning of the scientific, and a metaphorical and figurative with 67. Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing, 3. 68. Glanvill, Essays on Several Important Subjects in Philosophy and Religion, 4.

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an abstract non-figurative way of describing the world.”69 This is essentially R. F. Jones’s thesis restated, and it is—in more general terms—the thesis that most often accompanies syntactical explanations of stylistic reform in seventeenth-century England. Medcalf adds that the syntactical shifts in Glanvill offer clear evidence that Glanvill “carries out Locke’s program” of plainness, achieving “a positive world ..... of consummated literalism.”70 Medcalf rightly perceives in Glanvill a movement away from the scholastic era and toward the scientific era, and this shift appears in the changed aura of Glanvill’s Scepsis scientifica. The important evidence verifying this shift, however, is not, as Medcalf argues, primarily syntactical. In all three versions, Glanvill provides more than enough tropes, elaborate sentences, etc., to complicate any idea that he writes in a “literal” way, as opposed to a “figurative” way. The idea that the older Glanvill writes in a non-figurative manner, in fact, proves inchoate. Like every other writer, scientific or otherwise, the mature Glanvill uses an abundance of tropes in his works. All of the new philosophers use figurative rhetoric, even in their most technical discussions and debates.71 To suggest otherwise is to mischaracterize the nature of writing. The idea of a non-figurative writing style contradicts the idea of a writing style, which is figurative by nature. The change in Glanvill’s style involves a movement away from an occult conception of rhetoric and toward an experimental conception. By omitting the story of the magician from Scepsis scientifica, Glanvill disavows the worlds of mystery and charm. He casts linguistic structures not as enchanted objects, but rather as mere ornaments used to decorate the ideas themselves—the substance discovered by scientific methodology. The Glanvill of Scepsis scientifica wholeheartedly endorses a modern understanding of rhetoric, and 69. Medcalf, The Three Versions, xii. 70. Ibid., xxxiv–xxxviii. 71. On the importance of rhetoric in scientific arguments in the Renaissance, see Jean Dietz Moss, Novelties in the Heavens: Rhetoric and Science in the Copernican Controversy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). See also Moss and William A. Wallace, Rhetoric and Dialectic in the Time of Galileo (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2003); Jeanne Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures in Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Alan Gross, The Rhetoric of Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).

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this is the crucial paradigm shift in his work, which is a philosophical shift at heart, rather than a syntactical one. Glanvill reconceptualizes the very nature of language, rejecting the power of the occult imagination and the numinous tropes contained therein.

Plain Language in Sadducismus triumphatus Glanvill also investigated witchcraft throughout his career. Many members of the Royal Society did the same, including the physician Thomas Willis, the eclectic philosopher Henry More, and the mathematician George Sinclair, who published Satan’s Invisible World Discovered in 1685. William Brereton was also a key figure in promoting the scientific study of witchery. For his part, Brereton produced a roughly written history of spirits in the Baconian tradition, compiling numerous contemporary cases of demonic possession and spell casting. Using these compilations as evidence, Glanvill assembled Sadducismus triumphatus; Or, Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions, published posthumously in 1681. He included in the text his own earlier arguments concerning the reality of witchcraft, originally published in 1666 under the title A Philosophical Endeavor Towards the Defense of the Being of Witches and Apparitions. Glanvill also provided additional demonstrations in this revised and expanded edition, which was hugely successful and widely read. While other studies of witchcraft exerted a strong influence upon late seventeenth-century intellectual circles, Sadducismus triumphatus represented a pinnacle of accomplishment in this area of inquiry. Of particular interest, Glanvill makes all of his arguments in the same idiom, that is, in the new plain style, or what More describes in the preface as “the plain [rhetorical] shape of a mere naturalist,” as opposed to the not-so-plain shape of a nonconformist enthusiast, a pantheistic Ranter, or a Catholic mystic.72 For Glanvill, as for More, plainness functions as the antithesis of mysterious rhetoric broadly imagined. He signals this idea in several places, including the book’s subtitle (“plain evidence”), but Glanvill’s most provocative remark about rhetorical-methodological plainness arrives during an analy72. Henry More, Sadducismus triumphatus, Preface.

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sis of demonic deception. Responding to the Cartesian postulate that demons—using diabolical sophistry—might be able to fool humanity into believing that humanity exists, Glanvill notes the following: To say that Providence will suffer us to be deceived in things of the greatest concernment, when we use the best of our care and endeavors to prevent it, is to speak hard things of God....... If the Providence and Goodness of God be not a security unto us against such Deceptions, we cannot be assured, but that we are always abused by those mischievous Agents, in the objects of plain sense, and in all the matters of our daily Converses.73

Glanvill uses the adjective “plain” to mark the contrast between unmitigated natural experiences and mitigated preternatural experiences, in this case, the mitigation of demons, those “mischievous Agents” who use enchantments to enthrall humanity. And while the main target is Descartes’s demon, Glanvill also warns readers about charmed sophistry in general, juxtaposing the new plain language of science against the world of preternatural spell casting. In brief, plainness operates in the passage above—and in Sadducismus triumphatus in general—as an indicator of non-mysterious experience, methodology, and rhetoric. The plain style is an object of plain sense, while the language of preternatural charming is not. On the topic of who violates the principles of rhetorical plainness most often, Glanvill provides two answers: witches and Catholic priests, but not necessarily in that order. He reserves his most stinging censures for Catholicism, which plays an important role in the book, though a purely negative one. Specifically, Glanvill admonishes “Popish Inquisitors” and other “witch-finders” for doing “much wrong,” and he lumps together “Popish Superstitions” with other esoteric ideas, including most notably the phenomenon of “real transmutation [i.e., metonyming] of Men and Women into other Creatures.”74 For Glanvill, the mystical substitutions associat73. Glanvill, Sadducismus triumphatus, 102–3. 74. Ibid., 8–9. On Glanvill and religion, see Jackson I. Cope, “Joseph Glanvill, Anglican Apologist,” PMLA 69 (1954): 223–50. See also Robert Stock, The Holy and the Daemonic from Thomas Browne to William Blake (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982). On Glanvill and witchcraft, see Thomas Jobe, “The Devil in Restoration Science: The

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ed with Catholic sacramental theology prove indistinguishable from other kinds of rhetorical transmogrifications claimed by sorcerers, the transformations of lead into gold, for example, or the metamorphoses of shape-changers. The latitudinarian new scientists group all of these mystical and magical rhetorical ideas together under the same demonic rubric, where werewolves and transubstantiation co-exist, not as fairy tales, but rather as stories of nefarious sorcery. Of course, this sort of argument against Catholic mysticism is commonplace among seventeenth-century Anglican experimentalists, even pro forma. The reason why it is pro forma is another matter, however, and an interesting one for those of us who study rhetoric. The acceptance of numinous tropology (e.g., mystical metonyming) sets Catholicism against the new scientist’s plain philosophy of style, and this is precisely why Glanvill puts in opposition to each other the enchanted rhetoric of the Catholic mystic and the plain rhetoric of the modern experimentalist. In Plus ultra, Glanvill uses the term “transmutation” in a similar way, only in this case he repudiates “the delusory Designs,” “Transmutations,” and “Charms” of the Rosicrucian magicians.75 For Glanvill, transmutation is a plain rhetorical figure in all instances. It is neither magical nor mystical. Metonyms are utilitarian structures, dress for the ideas themselves. But this is not how metonyming functions in Rosicrucian language magic, where sorcerers use enchanted tropes to alter the shape of reality. To rearrange metonyms is to rearrange the very fabric of the cosmos, by the precepts of the Renaissance magician, while in Glanvill’s philosophy of rhetoric, rearranging metonyms is simply a matter of shifting adornment, rather than ontology. Though skeptical of natural magic and continental mysticism, most members of the Royal Society—Glanvill included—were not moving in the direction of disbelief, and neither were earlier experimentalists such as Bacon and Sennert, who worked within a framework where modern science and Anglican theology complemented Glanvill-Webster Witchcraft Debate,” Isis 72 (1981): 342–56; Moody Prior, “Joseph Glanvill, Witchcraft, and Seventeenth-Century Science,” Modern Philology 30 (1932): 167–93. 75. Glanvill, Plus ultra (London, 1668), 12.

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each other. Far from dividing religion and science, the natural philosophers joined religion and science together, attempting to fortify Anglicanism through the tests, procedures, and taxonomies of experimental methodology. The new experimentalists moved in the direction of establishing systematic and rationalistic methods for conceptualizing and studying immaterial entities, including angels, devils, and cosmic energies. These philosophers desired to understand more fully preternatural causation, therefore making it less mysterious, not less spiritual, a sentiment expressed most clearly in Bacon’s natural philosophy: Nor am I of the opinion in this history of marvels, that superstitious narrations of sorceries, witchcrafts, dreams, divinations, and the like, where there is an assurance and clear evidence of the fact, be altogether excluded. For it is not yet known in what cases and how far effects attributed to superstition participate of natural causes: and therefore howsoever the practice of such things is to be condemned, yet from the speculation and consideration of them light may be taken, not only for the discerning of the offenses, but for the further disclosing of nature.76

The problem with denying the existence of spirits altogether was that such denials could easily lead to categorical denials of metaphysics. No member of the Royal Society was more conscious of this fact than Glanvill, who stated succinctly, “Atheism is begun in Saducism.”77 He amplifies the point in a cautionary proverb: those who do not believe in God “content themselves (for a fair step and introduction), to deny there are Spirits or Witches.”78 Henry More makes essentially the same claim, censuring those who deny of the existence of preternatural spirits: “That Saying was nothing so true in Politicks, No Bishop, No King, as is in Metaphysicks, No Spirit, no God.”79 The implication is straightforward: the denial of preternatural rhetorical enchantment (e.g., invoking spirits to work won76. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, II, 28. 77. Glanvill, Some Philosophical Considerations Touching the Being of Witches and Witchcraft (London, 1667), 4. 78. Ibid. 79. More, Antidote against Atheism (London, 1653), 164.

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ders) risks atheism, or already tacitly falls into atheism or agnosticism, because it underestimates the efficacy of the spiritual world. For Glanvill and More, the skeptic of witchcraft is one small step away from denying God’s existence. These arguments against sadducism by Glanvill and other members of the Royal Society find some of their Renaissance roots in King James I’s Daemonologie. Here, James defends the existence of demonic spell casting against “the damnable opinions” of “[Reginold] Scot,” who “is not ashamed in publike Print, to deny that there can be such a thing as Witch-craft; and so maintains the old errour of the Sadduces in denying of Spirits.”80 As James accurately reports, Scot rejects the metaphysical reality of witchery in his Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), an argument revived in the late seventeenth century, and one that reached its most influential expression in Francis Hutchenson’s An Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft (1718). For James, Scot’s arguments create a slippery slope that leads to atheism, because the disavowal of witchery calls into question all spiritual efficacies in the world. Finally, such claims challenge the very existence of spirits, including God.81 Most new scientists associated with the Royal Society shared a similar concern. They happily denied the possibility of natural magical rhetoric, but they did not deny the possibility of preternatural sorcery, because such renunciations signaled sadducism at best, and, at worst, atheism. New philosophers assumed that spiritual agents worked in the world to both good and bad ends. Glanvill was especially sensitive to this topic, which explains why he takes care repeatedly to acknowledge the efficacy of various types of preternatural rhetorical utterances: the spells of witches and warlocks, for example. The real question for Glanvill involved what types of spirits influenced enchanted language (e.g., angels or devils), not whether spirits influenced language. The subsequent rationalists of the Age of Reason should have heeded these warnings about sadducism. Mainstream English science slowly evolved into a myopic enterprise in the eighteenth cen80. James I, Daemonologie, in Forme of a Dialogue, Divided into Three Bookes (Edinburgh, 1597), Preface to the Reader. 81. Augustine makes a similar argument. See On Christian Doctrine, 55–57.

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tury, as the idea of God’s active participation in the cosmos faded from Enlightenment thought. This gave rise to the demonic idea of deism, already fully articulated at the end of the seventeenth century in John Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious (1696).82 While most experimentalists at the turn of the century were unwilling to follow Toland, many were nonetheless too willing to nudge Spirit to the periphery of scientific philosophy (e.g., Robert Boyle), as eighteenth-century mechanicalism gained force. And just as many scientists were too willing from the start to push the miraculous out of the world. A suspicion toward God’s active and daily role in the cosmos was the first and most damaging step toward the later concept of a clock-maker god who, after setting in motion the blind force of a cosmic machine, stepped away. For the typical new philosopher in the late seventeenth century, however, the purpose of science was definitely not to arrive at deism and skepticism. Glanvill, for example, did not set out in that direction. Rather, his purpose was to discover and admire reverentially the workings of God’s creation. New science began as a mode of worship, and, at its most sublime, science remains a mode of worship, which cannot be said of the mechanical applications of science at the height of the Enlightenment.83

Conclusion Bacon and the subsequent new philosophers’ categorical distinction between non-occult rhetoric (i.e., plain tropes) and magical rhetoric calls into question Ross MacDonald’s thesis that the new philosophers were the first “generation of successful magicians.”84 This is a problematic claim, albeit an interesting one. It is true that some 82. On rhetoric and deism, see James Herrick, The Radical Rhetoric of the English Deists: The Discourse of Skepticism, 1680–1750 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997); Robert Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy: A Study in Adaptations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). 83. The Enlightenment philosopher Pierre Laplace, when asked by Napoleon where God fit into his mechanical philosophy, famously replied that he no longer needed that assumption. On this episode, see Ivar Ekeland, Mathematics and the Unexpected (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 12. 84. Ross MacDonald, “Occultism and Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century,” in Philosophy, Its History and Historiography, ed. A. J. Holland (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985), 102.

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of the discoveries by natural magicians became science in the seventeenth century, as MacDonald shows, especially discoveries involving mathematics and herbal medicine. Paracelsus, for example, remains an important figure not only in alchemy, but also in chemistry, despite his overtly astrological framework. The same point can be made about John Dee’s magic, as Nicholas Clulee observes: “Isolated aspects of Dee’s ‘doctrine experimentall’ may perhaps represent a fruitful method for the investigation of nature and look forward to modern experimental methods.”85 Those experimental aspects, however, Clulee adds in a crucial qualification, remain “inextricably tied” to “the magical aspects of Dee’s philosophy,” which point “in the direction of a spiritual knowledge so opposed to natural science as later understood” that “Renaissance magic and occultism” in no way should be accepted as “unambiguously contribut[ing] to the evolution of a new science.”86 Clulee is right. In a twilight effort to preserve occult philosophy, the natural magicians of the late Renaissance tried to expand their universe to the degree that it accommodated modern science. They failed, and perhaps their projects were doomed from the start. While magicians desired to incorporate experimentalism into the world of magic, new philosophers wanted the exact opposite, that is, to dissociate themselves from the world of sorcery and esoterica. Bacon, Sennert, Glanvill, and other advancers of learning reject magical philosophy. Of great consequence to the rhetorical tradition, this includes a thoroughgoing rejection of magical rhetoric in all of its manifestations. Perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of seventeenth-century experimental philosophy—and the principles of rhetorical plainness contained therein—is this campaign opposing charmed tropes. Working against the assumptions of the occult Renaissance cosmos, new philosophers advance a non-magical philosophy of rhetoric commensurable with the ethos of modern experimentalism, and this new style, or, more precisely, this new philosophy of style, marks the origins of modern English rhetoric. 85. Nicholas H. Clulee, “At the Crossroads of Magic and Science: John Dee’s Archemastrie,” in Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, ed. Vickers, 65. 86. Clulee, “John Dee’s Archemastrie,” 65.

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Chapter 2

L anguage R eform i n t he L ate Seventeenth Cent ur y

)( In the opening chapter, I focused upon the rise of the new plain style, emphasizing how modern experimentalists rejected both the tropes of magic and mystery and, in the opposite direction, the discourses of materialism and skepticism (e.g., sadducism, deism, and atheism). In this chapter, I concentrate on the culmination of rhetorical reform in early modern England: the Royal Society’s plain language program. I show in particular how members of the organization and other like-minded writers used the new plain style in order to counteract bewitching idioms, which most intellectuals of the period saw as the primary linguistic cause of England’s religious and social strife. My overarching argument is that a group of experimental philosophers—by creating a new understanding of style, and of language in general—brought about a paradigm shift in the English rhetorical tradition. Of course, significant changes in the world require 47 

many different participants in many different capacities, and the seventeenth-century reformation in style is no exception. A small circle of scientific writers did not alter the linguistic cosmos by themselves. To appreciate how plainness emerged on a large scale requires at minimum a non-linear model of how ideas influence societies, not to mention an intuition about the workings of Zeitgeists. James Sutherland is a bit hyperbolic when he suggests that after 1660 English prose gets a fresh start.1 He would have been more accurate to say that English philosophy of rhetoric begins anew around 1665, give or take several years, building upon Francis Bacon’s key formulation of the split between words and things in The Advancement of Learning, and also drawing upon many other criticisms of enchanted rhetoric in the late Renaissance, including those offered by philosophers, orators, poets, and, most notably, preachers and theologians. That phrasing, however, is cumbersome. English rhetoric begins anew on a massive scale in the Restoration, when the occult Renaissance cosmos starts to collapse in mainstream intellectual circles. On the question of who deserves the most credit for conceptualizing this rhetorical reformation (though not the only credit), it is difficult, if not impossible, to identify any other group besides those working in the tradition of modern experimentalism, before and after the establishment of the Royal Society. By advancing plainness so effectively, experimental philosophers transformed the English rhetorical universe, laying groundwork for the rise of the Enlightenment linguistic sensibility broadly imagined.

Thomas Sprat’s and John Locke’s Arguments against Bewitching Rhetoric Many writers advanced the cause of rhetorical plainness in the late seventeenth century, but the most famous argument arrives in The History of the Royal Society (1667), where Thomas Sprat claims that the Royal Society shapes a new “plain” style for a new epoch.2 Sprat, to be sure, advertises the plain language program as much as he reports upon its widespread influence. And, more generally, he writes some1. Sutherland, On English Prose, 67. 2. Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society (London, 1667),112.

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thing other than disinterested history in his History, which should not be a surprise. His book is better seen as hopeful history, but with real momentum. In 1667, it is too early to say definitively that Sprat was correct about what he described. After all, the Royal Society was in its infancy, and the idea of stylistic plainness still met with considerable resistance from numerous magical and mystical philosophers, including occult writers such as Elias Ashmole and Thomas Vaughan, both of whom worked against plainness as members of the Royal Society.3 Importantly, however, Sprat was in the process of becoming right as the idea of the new plain style slowly pervaded almost every aspect of Restoration scientific and rhetorical culture, after many decades of conflict between new philosophers and occultists of various sorts. While far from neutral in his vision of the world, Sprat captured the gist of a massive rhetorical shift, even a catastrophic shift, from the standpoint of occult mentalities. Sprat attacks “tropes and figures” in what has become a wellknown passage from the History, where he simultaneously advocates the new plain style.4 After noting that rhetorical ornaments pose no threat in the “hands of Wise Men,” but pose a serious threat in the hands of “the Wicked,” Sprat comments upon contemporary rhetoric in England: “But now [tropes] are generally chang’d to worse uses: they make the fancy disgust the best things, if they come to sound, and unadorned: they are in open defiance against Reason [..... and] they give the mind a motion too changeable, and bewitching, to consist with right practice.”5 Sprat argues that certain applications of tropes must be avoided because they have a “bewitching” effect. In other words, he figures bewitchment—not elaborate syntax—as the antithesis of rhetorical plainness. He bolsters the point by describing non-plain uses of rhetoric as “evil,” which resonates with his earlier term “wicked.”6 Sprat places the Royal Society’s plain style movement within a larger theological struggle between good and evil, between the experiments of scientists and the exper3. On Ashmole, see Tobias Churton, The Magus of Freemasonry: The Mysterious Life of Elias Ashmole—Scientist, Alchemist, and Founder of the Royal Society (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2006). 4. Sprat, History of the Royal Society, 112. 5. Ibid., 111. 6. Ibid.

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iments of preternatural charmers. Importantly, too, words such as “evil” and “bewitching” do not have light-hearted auras in Sprat’s work. By “bewitching,” he means bewitchment in the most obvious sense—that is—real witchcraft. A staunch Anglican in the same intellectual circle as John Wilkins and Joseph Glanvill, Sprat believes wholeheartedly in the efficacy of preternatural sorcery (e.g., the conjuring of demons, the casting of spells). Moreover, he clearly sees such diabolical activity as especially rampant in the Interregnum and early Restoration: rhetoric has “chang’d to worse uses.” Demonic eloquence abounds, and rhetorical plainness becomes in this context the best linguistic hope against those nefarious idioms that infiltrate large segments of the English population, creating the lingering possibility of warfare and strife. The Royal Society’s push for plainness is a direct push against demonry, Sprat contends. The real enemy of plainness in The History is the Enemy, a neglected but crucial aspect of the new philosophers’ rhetorical reforms. The emphasis upon bewitchment as the contrast to plainness goes a long way toward explaining what Robert Stillman presents as the puzzle of Sprat’s argument: “The tension between the figural action of [Sprat’s History] and its frequently expressed hostility to figuration needs to be explained, not explained away.”7 Brian Vickers identifies the apparent problem even more dramatically, suggesting that Sprat suffers from blatant hypocrisy: “Those who attack rhetoric [e.g., Sprat, Locke] continued to use it, and the pronouncements of an avant-garde elite are as little use then, as now, for recording the whole picture.”8 Thomas Conley makes a similar observation: “Nor can we overlook the fact that even those who joined the Society’s resolution [to write plainly] continued, in many cases, the same sort of prose they had condemned.”9 Sprat, however, is completely aware of his rhetoricity, but even 7. Stillman, The New Philosophy and Universal Languages in Seventeenth-Century England, 36. 8. Vickers, In Defense of Rhetoric, 201. 9. Thomas Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition, 169. For other readings that focus problematically upon Sprat’s syntax, not his philosophy of style, see Richard Nate, “Rhetoric in the Early Royal Society,” in Rhetorica movet, ed. Peter Oesterreich and Thomas Sloane (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 215–33; Carey McIntosh, The Evolution of English Prose, 1700–1800

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more importantly, he is aware that it is a certain type of rhetoricity, a non-bewitching type, which is precisely the sort of rhetoric that he advocates in the passage. No tension whatsoever exists between Sprat’s call for plainness and his ample use of tropes and figures, because his tropes and figures are plain. Sprat is not a hypocrite. The rhetoric he attacks is not the rhetoric he uses. The difference between plain and bewitching tropes is the key distinction here. Critics have not fully appreciated the extra level of rhetoricity that Sprat builds into his own analysis of rhetoric, which causes them to charge Sprat with some form of self-contradictory rhetorical behavior. Rather than contradicting himself, Sprat provides a spectacular rhetorical instance of his point. Sprat uses plain tropes to challenge bewitching tropes. He illustrates. In the process, he also warns against the true threat to the new plain style: witchcraft and its concomitant rhetorical practices of enchantment, hexing, and charming. Sprat makes a philosophical argument against demonic rhetoric in this renowned defense of plainness, not an argument against tropes, not an argument against elaborate syntax, and certainly not an argument against the rhetorical tradition. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 153; Werner Hüllen, “Sprat’s Demand for a Plain Style Reconsidered,” in Papers in the History of Linguistics, ed. Hans Aarsleff, Louis Kelly, and Hans-Josef Niederehe (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1987), 247–62. For additional arguments that similarly misconstrue the nature of the Royal Society’s plain language reforms, see Jeanne Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures in Science; John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996); Adam Potkay, The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994); Robert Markley, Fallen Languages: Crisis of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660–1740 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993); Debora Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the Renaissance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988); Michael Srigley, “The Evolution of the Plain Style in the Seventeenth Century,” Studia Neophilologica 60 (1988): 179–92; Peter Dear, “Rhetoric and Authority in the Early Royal Society,” Isis 76 (1985): 145–61; Paul Arakelian, “The Myth of a Restoration Style Shift,” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 20 (1979): 227–45; Murray Cohen, Sensible Words: Linguistic Practice in England, 1640–1785 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); Joan Webber, Style and Self in Seventeenth-Century Prose (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968); Frank Wilson, Seventeenth-Century Prose: Five Lectures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960); Wilbur Samuel Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1956); A. C. Howell, “Res et Verba: Words and Things,” English Literary History 13 (1946): 131–42; Hugh MacDonald, “Another Aspect of Seventeenth-Century Prose,” Review of English Studies 19 (1943): 33–43; Joan Bennett, “An Aspect of the Evolution of Seventeenth-Century Prose,” Review of English Studies 17 (1941): 281–97.

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Sprat, in fact, insists that the writers of the Royal Society should “keep up the Ornaments of speaking,” suggesting furthermore that “Rhetoric” is “a Weapon which may be as fully prouv’d by bad men, as good.”10 Sprat does the exact opposite of what he is often accused of doing. He calls upon members of the Royal Society to use tropes for the good, and to recover their usefulness, provided that they apply them in non-bewitching ways. While discussing Bacon’s achievements later in the History, Sprat offers additional evidence that he does not abandon ornamentation. He praises Bacon’s “Noble Labours in [natural] Philosophy,” where Bacon is able “to express and adorn his thoughts” with “a vast Treasure” of “imaginings.”11 In other words, Sprat admires Bacon’s facility with rhetoric, because Bacon uses tropes in a modern skeptical way, as mere adornment to decorate the substance of the idea. After pointing to several “purple passages” in the History, Richard Kroll makes a similar argument about Sprat’s positive though qualified application of rhetorical figures: “What Sprat resists is not figuration as such, but its false application.”12 Yes! And, moreover, the false applications of tropes that most concern Sprat are the metaphors of witchcraft and occult philosophy. Joseph Glanvill, another member of the Royal Society often criticized for using metaphors to denounce metaphors, also distinguishes between wicked and edifying applications of tropes, doing so by praising Sprat’s eloquence in the History. Glanvill argues that the “style” of the “book hath all the properties” to “recommend,” because it is not broken with ends of Latin, nor impertinent quotations; nor made harsh by hard words, or needless terms of Art; not rendered intricate by long Parentheses, nor gaudy by flaunting metaphors; not tedious by wide fetches and circumferences of Speech, nor dark by too much curtness of Expression; Tis not lose and unjointed, rugged and uneven; but as polite and fast as Marble; and briefly avoids all the notorious defects, and wants none of the proper ornaments of Language.13 10. Sprat, History of the Royal Society, 111. 11. Ibid., 411. 12. Richard Kroll, The Material World: Literate Culture in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 278. 13. Glanvill, Plus ultra, 84.

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Ornamentation does not trouble Glanvill, as is evidenced by this now famous metaphorical description of Sprat’s plain style: “as polite and fast as Marble,” a spectacular simile. The “flaunting metaphors” and “dark” expressions of Renaissance spell casters are a different issue entirely, however, not because they are metaphors as such, but instead because they carry with them the presuppositions of an occult sensibility. The other notorious defects to which Glanvill speaks presumably include metaphysical conceits (“wide circumferences”), mystical word plays, anagrams, cryptograms, and other rhetorical accoutrements of the charmed Renaissance cosmos. Glanvill replaces periaptic metaphors with the “proper ornaments of Language.” He advocates a new philosophy of plainness, which has nothing to do with abandoning tropes. Rather, Glanvill applauds the proper application of tropes, all the while distancing English science from witchcraft and charming. Sprat’s and Glanvill’s arguments shatter the widely held perception that members of the Royal Society are somehow anti-rhetorical.14 They are not. Positive remarks about rhetoric by Sprat and Glanvill also dispel the idea that they promote some type of antieloquence. It is probably even misleading to suggest that the new philosophers reject the Erasmian idea of copia rerum ac verborum, though they certainly do not celebrate it. Sprat and Glanvill’s main purpose is to advance a modern philosophical awareness of rhetoricity as mere adornment, not magical adornment. They are antioccult. This holds for both scientific and non-scientific discourses. To this end, Sprat imagines a special committee of the Royal Society that might function along the lines of the Port-Royal Academie Francaise, a group established in Paris in 1638, and one organized to protect the French language. Sprat advises the Royal Society to formulate a similar committee, a “fixt and Impartial Court of Eloquence, according to whose Censure, all Books, or Authors, should either stand or fall.”15 Such a court of English eloquence was created a few years later, and John Dryden, among other notable intellectu14. See Robinson, The Rise and Establishment of Modern English Prose, 160; Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric, 164–65; Croll, “Review of R. F. Jones’s ‘Science and English Prose Style,’” 91–92. 15. Sprat, History of the Royal Society, 43.

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als, served on it. But it is the scope of Sprat’s remark which is especially significant, because the Royal Society appears as an arbitrator of all eloquence, not only scientific eloquence. The new rhetorical plainness functions as the instrument of learning’s advancement in every philological context, “all Books, or Authors.” The Royal Society’s language reforms are imagined to be comprehensive, and this comprehensiveness again serves as strong evidence against attempts to limit the plain language reforms to narrowly scientific contexts.16 Following in Sprat’s footsteps, Locke also critiques rhetorical bewitchment, all the while advancing the new plain philosophy of style. The often-quoted passage from his third book of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) provides a good starting point for analysis: If we would speak of things as they are, we must allow that all the art of rhetoric, besides order and clearness; all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheats; and therefore, however laudable or allowable oratory may render them in harangues and popular addresses, they are certainly in all discourses that pretend to inform or instruct, wholly to be avoided; and where truth and knowledge are concerned, cannot but be thought a great fault, either of the language or the person that makes use of them....... [Yet] eloquence, like the fair sex, has too prevailing beauties in it to suffer itself ever to be spoken against. And it is in vain to find faults with those arts of deceiving, where in men find pleasure to be deceived.17 16. R. S. Crane tries to resolve Sprat’s apparent stylistic hypocrisy by saying that the Society’s plain style program targeted only scientific language, not all types of discourse. Crane, “Review of R. F. Jones’ ‘Science and English Prose Style,’” in Seventeenth-Century Prose, ed. Stanley Fish (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 92–93. See also Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition, 169. Sprat’s and Wilkins’s own remarks about the scope of the plain language program, however, betray these arguments. When Sprat contends that esoteric styles “ought to be banish’d out of all civil Societies, as a thing fatal to Peace and Good Manners,” his critique extends beyond scientific discourse (111–13). Wilkins also attacks the “grand imposture of Phrases” that has “almost eaten our solid knowledge in all professions” (Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophic Language [London, 1668], 17–18). The plain style mandate extends to “all professions,” not just scientific discourses. 17. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 508.

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Locke captures some of the key attitudes surrounding mainstream Restoration philosophy of language, including most markedly the distinction between words and reality, between ornamentation and “things as they are.”18 There is also undoubtedly an anxiety about feminine mystery in Locke, and one certainly discovers an aspect of that here. A cryptic reference to Eve’s deceit of Adam appears in the subtext. If there is a moral to the last sentence, it is as straightforward as this: do not be so easily fooled by feminine guile. Negative feminine archetypes from classical literature should also come to mind. By feminizing the abuse of words, Locke recalls ancient warnings about sirens’ songs and Circe’s enchantments, rhetorical acts that pretend and promise but do not deliver, or, worse yet, deliver and then double-cross. Locke’s attack upon seductive eloquence, however, goes much deeper than an anxiety about feminine guile. The main target of his argument is the Devil himself. Female figure casters and witches simply stand in for the “Prince of Darkness.”19 Readers discover this most important aspect of Locke’s philosophy of rhetoric by leaving behind the often-quoted third book and examining his critique of enthusiastic eloquence in chapter 19 of the fourth book, where he discusses more fruitfully the proper and improper uses of rhetoric. For Locke, enthusiastic orators who apply tropes in seductive ways “perswade” people by creating “false light,” a rhetorical strategy inspired by the “Son of the Morning [i.e., the Devil].”20 In brief, Locke worries about demonic eloquence. Rhetoric by itself does not concern him. Rather, fiendish sophistry does. And Locke illustrates the point with his own convincing rhetoric, his argument by analogy. He uses paradigms of true and false light to make the case against demonic persuasion, a form of eloquence that seduces listeners into misguided feelings of warmth and illumination. Locke summarily 18. On Locke’s philosophy and rhetoric, see Peter Walmsley, Locke’s Essay and the Rhetoric of Science (Bucknell, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2003); Jules Law, The Rhetoric of Empiricism: Language and Perception from Locke to I. A. Richards (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993); Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). 19. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 703. 20. Ibid.

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rejects such rhetoric: “To talk of any other light [besides the light of reason] in the Understanding is to put ourselves in the dark, or in the Power of the Prince of Darkness, and by our own consent, to give ourselves up to Delusion to believe a Lie.”21 Exactly as Sprat does, Locke targets rhetorical bewitchment. The “Prince of Darkness” encourages humanity to believe lies by dressing them in seductive tropes, a point that harkens back to the story of Eden, where the Devil tells the first lie and reveals himself as the Father of Lies. Locke also recalls in book 4 his earlier remark in book 3 about men who willingly believe the deceptions of seductive rhetoric, as they believe the deceptions of women. In both cases, he addresses inappropriately amorous eloquence, but in book 4 he exposes the Devil as the figure standing behind such improper “application[s] of words.” Satan, in other words, attempts through sophistry to mislead humanity by subverting the God-given light of reason. Akin to the harlot witch, the enthusiastic orator in book 4 represents one more variation upon the Lockean theme of demonic seduction and, ultimately, demonic possession. The Prince of Darkness leads individuals—and congregations of individuals—down the road of ruin, all the while pretending toward illumination, in what amounts to a prime example of demonic inversion: sweet seems bitter, and bitter seems sweet. Locke makes a theological argument against bewitching rhetoric, using the specific example of the enthusiastic orator to show how the Devil attempts to invert divine impulses in language. Audiences who succumb to rhetorical seductions, however, often feel “as fully satisfied of the illumination, i.e., are as strongly perswaded” as those who “are enlightened by the spirit of God.”22 In one of the Essay’s unusually poetic passages, Locke argues that wicked orators literally spellbind audiences, causing them to plummet into the abyss to the exact degree that they feel illuminated by truth. This is demonic irony in the extreme, applicable to Faustus’s situation, for example, or to Macbeth’s possession, where the Thane of Cawdor feels as if he is becoming himself (i.e., Macbeth the king) to the exact degree that he 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 704.

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is destroying himself. Locke’s purpose is to explain and then admonish this form of rhetorical demonry, where diabolical forces mimic and simultaneously undercut the good. Philosophers and historians of rhetoric should also hear in the background of Locke’s passage an argument against the idioms of factional enthusiasm. For most new philosophers associated with the Royal Society, nonconformist rhetoric continued to represent a particularly widespread type of false illumination, putting England in grave danger, even several years after the Restoration. By the standards of Lockean philosophy of rhetoric, the nonconformist mystics and magicians claim to improve society to the exact degree that they destroy it. Nonconformist eloquence functions at the center of this dynamic, threatening to overpower the rational faculties of the self and of proper English society (i.e., Anglican government), for the bad moving of the will, to recall Bacon’s rhetorical framework—which is essentially Locke’s rhetorical framework. Given that demons attempt to persuade humanity falsely, Locke also wonders aloud how anyone “shall ..... distinguish between the delusions of Satan, and the inspiration of the Holy Ghost.”23 Descartes had raised this same topic in the Meditations on First Philosophy, pondering how a man might discover that he was fooled into believing that he thought, assuming that a demon could accomplish such a powerful rhetorical ruse.24 This is for Descartes the hypothetical counterpart to cogito ergo sum; that is, men and women might discover that they are fooled into thinking that they think, which also proves existence (one must exist in order to be fooled), but not the sort of existence that Descartes set out to prove. By “demon,” too, Descartes points to an evil spirit in the most literal sense, as does Locke, who believes wholeheartedly in the reality of the Devil. These philosophers are informed by traditional Christian metaphysics, which includes the reality of Satan’s diabolical schemes. Responding to the problem of differentiating between false and true illuminations, Descartes and Locke offer essentially the same philosophical-rhetorical answer. The God23. Ibid., 703–4. 24. Rene Descartes, “Second Meditation,” in Meditations on First Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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given capacity of natural reason allows humanity to distinguish between true and false rhetoric—divine and demonic eloquence. Significantly, the new plain style (i.e., a modern, non-enchanted style) operates as the instrument of that rational faculty, and, moreover, operates as evidence of that rational faculty. Charmed eloquence functions contrarily as the rhetorical instrument of the Devil and his intermediaries: enthusiasts, witches, alchemists, and magicians. These demonic orators imitate the Divine, all the while trying to undercut God and all that is holy in humanity (i.e., the breath of God, the human idiom in its edifying manifestation). As readers might expect, Locke identifies in Satanic rhetoric a troubling combination of antithesis and irony. The concomitant rhetorical plainness that flows from reason, not the diabolical imagination, subsequently becomes the rhetorical signal that one is not under the Devil’s spell. Female witches usually cast spells most effectively, which again is why Locke emphasizes the feminine aspect of guile in his famous passage in book 3. The guile in question, however, is demonic at heart, and it is this element that should be highlighted. Locke thus advances the Royal Society’s language reforms, rejecting rhetorical enchantment and favoring the new plain style. He takes as self-evident the assumption that demons work through language to mislead humanity. The cure for such insidious rhetorical behavior is the Royal Society’s plain sensibility, or what Locke also refers to as the plain, historical method, an idea of language and reality grounded not upon the darksome world of witchery, but rather upon the physical-theological world of new science. Moreover, it should be clear by now that plainness is a philosophical category for the advancers of learning. Like Sprat, Locke continues to use a variety of rhetorical tropes and strategies, but he does so plainly, not purging tropes from discourse, but instead applying tropes in merely ornamental ways.

Plain Conceits in Modern Philosophical Poetry As representative examples of poets touched by Baconian philosophy, Abraham Cowley and Samuel Butler play important roles in promulgating the new plain sensibility. Both poets critique Renaissance 58   l anguage reform

magic, all the while advancing a non-occult philosophy of rhetoric built upon scientific advancement and Anglican orthodoxy. They forward the momentum of rhetorical plainness in Restoration England, where the occult philosopher’s charmed tropes and the witch’s preternatural invocations give way to the experimentalist’s mere ornaments. As a preface to The History of the Royal Society, Sprat attaches Abraham Cowley’s “To the Royal Society,” a laudatory poem that recounts how new philosophers jettisoned the old world of enchantment.25 Cowley’s main purpose is to render in verse form the Zeitgeist of scientific experimentalism, which he accomplishes with considerable zeal. Concerning the rhetorical tradition in particular, Cowley aptly characterizes the Royal Society’s language reforms, from the standpoint of the reformers themselves: So from all Modern Folies He [Sprat] Has vindicated Eloquence and Wit. His candid Stile like a clean Stream does slide,  And his bright Fancy all the way   Does like the Sun-shine in it play.                (ll. 174–78)

Sprat rescues “Eloquence and Wit” from “all Modern Folies,” not only scientific ones. The Royal Society’s language reforms extend beyond the confines of the laboratory, as the poet reports, touching every aspect of English rhetoric, which is essentially how members of the Royal Society saw their duty as language reformers. The point of the undertaking was to refine the English tongue broadly imagined. Even the faculty of fancy becomes in Cowley’s verse a thoroughly rational one. The imagination is now regulated by the candid and clean style of the new experimentalism, which recalls—however faintly—Bacon’s definition of rhetoric: “The application of reason to the imagination for the better moving of the will.”26 And neither is it 25. On Cowley and the new science, see Mary Elizabeth Green, “Abraham Cowley as Baconian Apostle,” Restoration 10 (1986): 68–75; Robert Hinman, Abraham Cowley’s World of Order (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), 92–134. 26. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, 64.

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a stretch to perceive in Cowley’s epideictic poetry a premonition of that same apotheosis of science expressed in Edmund Halley’s famous ode to Isaac Newton, attached to the first edition of Newton’s Principia (1687).27 The ode, originally composed in Latin, ends with a celebration of scientific advancement: Then ye who now on heavenly nectar fare, Come celebrate with me in song the name Of Newton, to the Muses dear; for he Unlocked the hidden treasures of Truth: So richly through his mind had Phoebus cast The radiance of his own divinity. Nearer the gods no mortal may approach.                 (ll. 59–65)

The new scientist, rather than the inspired poet, appears in this proto-Enlightenment verse as the greatest champion of radiant truth, which becomes increasingly mechanical in nature as the Age of Reason takes hold. The sublime orator, on the contrary, looks increasingly superstitious in this context, as the urbane Shaftesbury is quick to suggest: “Amid the several styles and manners of discourse or writing, the easiest attainted and the earliest practiced was the miraculous, the pompous, or what we generally call the sublime.”28 While Sprat functions in Cowley’s ode as the Royal Society’s vindicator of eloquence and wit, Bacon plays the role of revered precursor: “Bacon at last ..... arose” and expelled the “ghost[s]” and “monsters” that made “children and superstitious Men afraid” (ll. 43–57). Cowley credits Bacon with moving English civilization out of the wilderness of fable and error, banishing occult ideas to the island of low science and superstition. Bacon achieves this success, 27. On poetry and new science, see Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse: Newton’s Optics and the Eighteenth-Century Poets (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1946). See also William Jones, Rhetoric of Science: A Study of Scientific Ideas and Imagery in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966). 28. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, and Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 108.

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moreover, by wielding “the plain Magic of true Reasons Light,” an odd expression at best, and, at worst, one that flirts with those Rosicrucians who desired to claim Bacon as one of their own (l. 45). What does Cowley mean when he says that Bacon used plain magic? The phrase relates to the new plain philosophy of rhetoric, though cryptically. By the precepts of learning’s advancement, “plain magic” means no magic at all in one’s rhetoric, or magic in reverse, which is the experimentalists’ rhetorical antidote to occult philosophy of language. Using the term “plain,” Cowley signals a non-occult attitude toward the occult. Plain magic is the end of magic. It is the triumph of rationalism over sorcery. Through the unusual expression, Cowley reveals how Bacon counteracts rhetorical bewitchment (i.e., the new plainness), ingeniously foreshadowing Sprat’s like-minded argument against linguistic bewitchment in the History. “To the Royal Society” is Cowley’s best-known defense of science and, concomitantly, of the new plain style, but he also takes up the issue of learning’s advancement in his encomium to William Harvey, which should be read as a sister poem to the ode. Cowley portrays the empirical researcher Harvey chasing the scantily clad nymph Daphne into a tree, only to discover small fibers, presumably to his disappointment: Coy Nature, (which remain’d, though aged grown, A Beauteous virgin still, injoy’d by none,  Nor seen unveil’d by any one) When Harveys violent passion she did see, Began to tremble, and to flee, Took Sanctuary like Daphne in a tree: There Daphnes lover stop’t, and thought it much  The very Leaves of her to touch, But Harvey our Apollo, stopt not so, Into the Bark, and root he after her did goe:  No smallest Fibres of a Plant, For which the eiebeams Point doth sharpness want,   His passage after her withstood.                    (1. ll. 1–13)

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Harvey uncovers a world of natural wonderment (smallest fibers), but not a world of magic. The poet juxtaposes in this scene two concepts of nature, one empirical and the other enchanted, favoring the former at the expense of the latter. As Cowley figures the passage, Harvey dispels all things occult. He represents another Bacon archetype, an experimentalist who banishes chimeras of the charmed imagination, and, perhaps, banishes the active role of Spirit in nature, which is a far more ominous underplot in the work. The argument culminates in a passage where the poet contrasts Harvey’s innovative methods with the old rituals of Renaissance occultism: Methinks in Arts great Circle others stand   Lock’t up together, Hand in Hand,   Everyone leads as he is lead,  The same bare path they tread, And Dance like Fairies a Fantastic round, But neither change their motion, nor their ground: Had Harvey to this road confin’d his wit, His noble circle of the Blood, had been untroden yet.                  (4. ll. 59–66)

Using the image of dancing fairies, Cowley alludes to ceremonial magic and alchemy. “Fairies” dancing in a “Fantastic” circle would have struck his audience as a magical procedure of some kind, a reference to a playful Puck, perhaps, or maybe a reference to sorcerers celebrating a pagan holiday under the full moon. The tone of the passage seems more serious than that of a midsummer night’s dream. It is closer to the tone of Plato’s Ion, where maidens dance frenetically by the riverside. Or, maybe Shakespeare’s Macbeth should come to mind, especially those scenes where witches undulate in a fantastic circle on the murky heath. However we characterize the “Fantastic round,” Cowley clearly makes a sober point. The royal physician, the subject of the poem, departs from the arcane heuristic procedures of the enchanted Renaissance cosmos and consequently discovers the blood’s circulation. That is, Harvey rejects occult methods. Using epideictic rhetoric, Cowley celebrates this advancement of learning, providing as well a significant lesson about the nature of rhetorical 62   l anguage reform

style. From a purely formal standpoint, Harvey’s model of circulation and the old model of circulation marked by dancing fairies both involve circles. The shape of the circle in and of itself, however, is no indicator of superstition, just as—by analogy—the formal shape of a sentence is no indicator of superstition. In this case, form must be informed by a philosophy of forma. Harvey produces a new circle, a plain circle, for a modern world, challenging the magical connotations of old models of circulation, physical, and, presumably, social and metaphysical. Harvey is often credited with reinventing the internal nature of human biology, but less is said about the external implications of his discovery. By grounding the impetus of circulation within the body itself, Harvey, in one swift blow, shatters Renaissance conceptions of physic, including magical and astrological thinking based upon macrocosm to microcosm correspondences, where objects like the stars and the planets are thought to influence the body’s and society’s agency through occult verisimilitudes. In the absence of these esoteric systems of correspondences and superlunary persuasions, new models of circulation, physiognomic and ontological (e.g., gravity), begin to emerge in seventeenth-century England. This is due in no small part to Harvey’s pioneering concept of internal impetus. The ancient categories of superlunary and sublunary existence give way to a modern theory of the cosmos, a place where the origins of motion in the body, and the body politic, are no longer grounded upon occult relationships with the crystalline sphere. This makes possible different avenues of agency and causation, including different ideas about how motion and circulation work. In the context of the rhetorical tradition, for example, Harvey’s discovery reshapes ideas about how language moves the heart, not with the help of the stars and the planets, as Paracelsian alchemists believed, but rather with the guidance of the mind’s sphere and other spiritual-biological structures. Harvey’s internalized universe of volition anticipates the rise of faculty psychology and the concomitant theory of rhetoric contained therein, culminating in the English rhetorical tradition in George Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776). By praising Sprat and Harvey, Cowley participates in this scienl anguage reform    63

tific trajectory. He writes as a modern philosophical poet, dismissing Interregnum furor and embracing the Baconian advancement of learning, which is advancement in all areas of study, including poetics. Poets such as John Donne, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, and Andrew Marvell appear increasingly superstitious against the backdrop of the new plain language reforms. In particular, their metaphysical conceits have all of the trappings of Cornelius Agrippa’s occult philosophy of verisimilitudes, or of Marsilio Ficino’s enchanted system of correspondences. In fact, this commonplace association between the metaphysical poets and occult practitioners is what caused metaphysical poetry to fall so far and so fast in Restoration England. Cowley’s reputation as a poet did not suffer, however, despite his ingenious habits (e.g., “plain magic”). Samuel Johnson, the sometime spokesman of Enlightenment values, even positions Cowley as the greatest poet of his generation.29 Why did not Cowley experience the same fate as many other metaphysical poets, to whom he is often compared? The brief answer is that his philosophy of rhetoric protected him. By clearly differentiating his poetic project from the projects of mystically inclined poets like Donne and Crashaw, Cowley makes himself a forerunner of modern politeness, as opposed to a twilight figure such as Vaughan, a poet who neither achieved nor desired that Restoration air of rhetorical austerity. Put differently, a mystical feeling lingers in the language of mainstream metaphysical poets and preachers. The same cannot be said of Cowley. And neither does Samuel Butler write in the metaphysical mode. Butler, the cantankerous satirical poet most famous for Hudibras, anticipated many of the Royal Society’s anti-magical sentiments, and he encouraged them, setting the stage for critiques of occult rhetoric in Cowley’s “To the Royal Society” and “Upon Dr. Harvey,” not to mention other modern philosophical poetry by Dryden, Swift, and Pope. Never a member of the Royal Society, Butler nonetheless played a major role in the Restoration plain language reforms, because he so forcefully reprimanded the occult Renaissance cosmos. In 1662–1663, he published the first two parts of Hudibras, a hugely popular mock epic at29. Samuel Johnson, “The Life of Cowley,” in The Lives of the English Poets (London, 1781).

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tacking magical rhetoric and bad politics, which for Butler were inextricably linked. The staunch Anglican begins the poem with a lengthy reflection upon the rhetorical tendencies of the not-so-heroic hero of the piece, whom he quickly associates with the world of magic: For RHETORIC, he could not ope His mouth, but out there flew a trope; And when he happen’d to break off I’ th’ middle of his speech, or cough, H’ had hard words, ready to show why, And tell what rules he did it by; Else, when with greatest art he spoke, You’d think he talk’d like other folk, For all a rhetorician’s rules Teach nothing but to name his tools. His ordinary rate of speech In loftiness of sound was rich; A Babylonish dialect, Which learned pedants much affect. It was a parti-colour’d dress Of patch’d and pie-bald languages; ’Twas English cut on Greek and Latin, Like fustian heretofore on satin; It had an odd promiscuous tone, As if h’ had talk’d three parts in one; Which made some think, when he did gabble, Th’ had heard three labourers of Babel; Or CERBERUS himself pronounce A leash of languages at once. This he as volubly would vent As if his stock would ne’er be spent: And truly, to support that charge, He had supplies as vast and large; For he cou’d coin, or counterfeit New words, with little or no wit: Words so debas’d and hard, no stone

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Was hard enough to touch them on; And when with hasty noise he spoke ’em, The ignorant for current took ’em; That had the orator, who once Did fill his mouth with pebble stones When he harangu’d, but known his phrase He would have us’d no other ways.               (1.82–118)

Butler compiles a shorthand list of commonplace arguments against occult rhetoric that had already been made by figures such as Bacon, Wilkins, and Meric Casaubon. As one who popularized philosophical attacks upon the vocabularies of magic, however, Butler provides an especially good summary of two key and interrelated ideas: occult rhetoric as babble and occult rhetoric as forgery. Butler first connects enchanted discourses to various “pie-bald” phenomena. Not surprisingly, the Tower of Babel looms as the dominant archetype throughout the critique. For Butler, as for most advancers of learning, occult rhetoric appears as an unnatural hodgepodge of parts, where spell casters assemble tropes and phrases in bizarre arrangement schemes, producing not eloquence but disorganized prattle.30 By Butler’s precepts, magical rhetors create Cerberus-like discourses, incoherent canting in several directions, which is an apt Anglican characterization of nonconformist illuminist rhetoric. Secondly, Butler accuses seventeenth-century occult writers of counterfeiting “hard words” in order to obfuscate the true emptiness of their philosophical systems. Magicians and astrologers appear throughout Hudibras as rhetors of false restoration, promising valuable rhetoric but delivering instead sound and fury signifying nothing. Using the phrase “hard words,” Butler also and surprisingly recalls the inkhorn controversies of the sixteenth century.31 Anxieties about inkhorn rhetoric as such had subsided by the time Butler 30. On Butler and rhetorical controversy, see Alvin Snider, Origins and Authority in Seventeenth-Century England: Bacon, Milton, Butler (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 204–43; Ian Jack, Augustan Satire: Intention and Idiom in English Poetry, 1660–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 27, 65–74. 31. See Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (London, 1660), 164–65.

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was writing, due in part to the success of Cawdrey’s Alphabetical List of hard words in 1605, the first monolingual dictionary in English.32 Nonetheless, a similar type of anxiety about continental vocabularies re-emerges during the English Interregnum, though on a smaller and more focused scale. In all times of national stress, debates about proper idioms and external influences upon those proper idioms intensify, and the English Interregnum and early Restoration are no exceptions. In the case of the 1640s–1660s, and from the vantage point of the Anglican Royalists, the esoteric vocabularies of astrology and magic contend for prominence with the rhetoric of the new English experimentalism. For the soon-to-be philosophers of the Royal Society, the threat to the English language (and to the English way of life) is not exactly inkhorn rhetoric as John Bale, John Cheke, or Thomas Wilson understood it, but rather the threat is a related type of discourse, that is, the rhetoric of continental esoterica. In Butler’s context, rhetorical diabolism is best exemplified by the circulation of Rosicrucian magic, theurgy, chiromancy, Catholic-style mysticism, and other habits of thought that work against Anglican orthodoxy. These idioms of magic and mysticism are the primary rhetorical targets in Hudibras. Butler’s reference to Demosthenes also proves interesting for reasons that go beyond the rejection of occult heuristics. The image allows Butler to criticize pronunciation, an often-overlooked aspect of magical rhetoric. He uses Demosthenes satirically to comment upon how contemporary orators might achieve the sort of pronunciation demanded by Rosicrucian spell casting. The hard words of magic prove especially sensitive to articulation. Against the backdrop of the occult arts, pronunciation takes on special connotations that have long since vanished in modern speech theory. To pronounce words correctly activated magical efficacy. Contrarily, to mispronounce words risked magical inefficacy, or, worse yet, magical misfire. Pronunciation takes on a less significant role in a paradigm where words and sounds are merely dress for thought, not entelechial expressions of a rhetorical-cosmological harmo32. Robert Cawdrey, Alphabetical List (London, 1605).

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ny, or what the young Glanvill refers to in The Vanity of Dogmatizing as a magical pitch.33 Mispronunciation may risk misunderstanding or embarrassment in modern rhetorical paradigms, as in the case of malapropisms, but it does not risk catastrophe: turning lead into something other than gold, knocking down walls inadvertently, transmogrifying audiences into beasts, corrupting sacraments, and so forth. In mystical and magical paradigms where sounds, pitches, and pronunciations participate in transforming the world, the requirements of oral rhetoric take on an additional layer of significance. In the occult Renaissance cosmos, mispronunciation becomes a mis-making of the cosmos. As Vickers rightly suggests about Renaissance magic, “to rearrange words is to rearrange reality.”34 Along the same lines, to rearrange sounds is to rearrange reality, which is why plays on sound hold such a provocative place in medieval and Renaissance occult eloquence. Butler understands this crucial role of paronomasia in magical rhetoric, and he relentlessly parodies it.35 The decline of occult philosophy in the seventeenth century is undoubtedly a key factor in the diminishing interest in the power of oral discourse, which is a lesson implicit in Butler’s critique. Perhaps the ruin of academic magic is even more significant to the topic of orality and literacy than the invention of the printing press. Walter Ong and most other historians of rhetoric point to the mass circulation of the printed word as the principal force in diminishing the significance of the spoken word in Renaissance and Enlightenment rhetoric, but the collapse of magic is probably even more substantial.36 Nothing technological prevents a reader from reading the printed word aloud, but something philosophical does. The “curi33. Joseph Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing, 198. 34. Brian Vickers, “Analogy versus Identity,” in Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, 106. 35. The reader may also and rightly detect a subtle critique of Catholic transubstantiation at work in Butler’s reference to putting pebbles in one’s mouth, or, concomitantly, putting the hard words of magic and mysticism in one’s mouth. “Transubstantiation” is one of those “hard words” to which Butler refers. The sacrament appears indirectly in Butler’s satire as a mere stone, or, in a more disturbing light, as mere loam. 36. Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982).

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ously silent” world of the new science, as Ong describes it, is a world without spell casting, where reading aloud and reading silently is a matter of preference, not a matter of reality making.37 Butler’s satire on pronunciation repudiates occult ideas about sound. That sound is an incidental rhetorical property for Butler becomes amusingly clear when he reveals his own willingness to change names in order to achieve a rhyme scheme. A squire he had, whose name was RALPH, That in th’ adventure went his half: Though writers, for more stately tone, Do call him RALPHO; ’tis all one; And when we can with metre safe, We’ll call him so; if not, plain RALPH.               (1.457–462)

In the alteration of the name, the poet neither gains nor loses anything essential. To rearrange words and sounds is not to rearrange reality in the modern rhetorical universe. Compare the passage above with Herbert’s mystical exploration of rhyme at the conclusion of “Denial,” one of the numinous poems in The Temple (1633):38 Therefore my soul lay out of sight,   Untuned, unstrung: My feeble spirit, unable to look right,   Like a nipped blossom, hung    Discontented. O cheer and tune my heartless breast,   Defer no time; That so thy favors granting my request,  They and my mind may chime,   And mend my rime.             (ll. 16–25) 37. Walter Ong, Ramus: Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), 118. 38. George Herbert, The Temple (London, 1633).

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Herbert uses rhyme to suggest a mysterious sympathy with God’s mystical order. After the first four stanzas of the poem conclude with unrhymed frustration, the poet finds his way back to heavenly music in the last stanza, by the grace of God, who “mend[s]” the poet’s rhyme and heart. Herbert’s rhymes are entelechial and reverberant, reinforcing the occult rhetorical principle of similia similibus (like produces like), which is one of the cornerstones of cosmic harmony in charmed philosophies of rhetoric. Butler’s rhymes have no such sublime concord. They are purely utilitarian. Butler accomplishes in satirical form what Cowley accomplishes straightforwardly—a repudiation of magical rhetoric. Of course, the satirical sting of a mock epic loses its force if it goes on for too long. Pope apprehends this point more clearly than Butler. The Rape of the Lock is a masterpiece. Hudibras is not, especially by the time Butler adds a third canto nearly a decade and a half after the original publication of the poem, in what amounts to a less than seamless sequel. Hudibras becomes its own kind of Cerberus, ironically. Nonetheless, on the topic of early Restoration rhetorical reform, Butler plays a far more important role than is usually acknowledged. He popularizes anti-magical attitudes toward language, calling into doubt the magical rhetoric of spell casters, which sets the stage for the Royal Society’s new plain style. Through stable irony, Butler forwards the antioccult sensibility of the Restoration language reformers, and so he participates firsthand in the advancement of modernity.

Preaching, New Science, and Plain Language R. F. Jones argues that preachers sympathetic to experimental philosophy played the greatest part in circulating the new plain style in late seventeenth-century England.39 This claim has been challenged recently, though it hardly seems controversial, if the idea is that 39. Richard F. Jones, “The Attack on Pulpit Eloquence in the Restoration: An Episode in the Development of the Neo-Classical Standard for Prose,” in The Seventeenth Century: Studies in the History of English Thought and Literature from Bacon to Pope (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1965), 111–42. See also Jones, “The Rhetoric of Science in England of the Mid-Seventeenth Century,” in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature: Essays in Honor of Alan Dugald McKillop, ed. Carroll Camden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 5–24.

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Anglican preachers had a longer reach in the Restoration than other groups, which is Jones’s contention.40 Bishops shaped the agenda in many ways, including rhetorically. I agree with the spirit of Jones’s thesis, except on the most vital point: he mistakenly speaks about a syntactical revolution, whereas I am arguing for a philosophicalrhetorical revolution. Such sweeping claims are difficult to prove, but no one had a more extensive influence than preachers. Of most interest are those eloquent bishops serving as members of the Royal Society. In particular, John Wilkins, John Tillotson, and Gilbert Burnet played significant roles in theorizing and circulating the new plain sensibility. Moreover, and most importantly for my thesis, plainness appears as a decidedly philosophical category in their writings, rather than a narrowly syntactical one. Theologians sympathetic to modern philosophy (mostly latitudinarian in temperament) advanced plainness in order to counteract occult philosophies of rhetoric.41 Scientifically minded preachers expressed the same overriding concern that every other advancer of learning expressed, and this is an anxiety about the charmed Renaissance cosmos and the esoteric rhetorical activities contained therein. In A Discourse Concerning the Gift of Prayer (1653), Wilkins argues for “plain English” in religious rhetoric, and in all writing and speaking, for that matter. Simultaneously, he argues against stylistic “Affectation,” by which he means either too much neatness and elegance, or else a mystical kind of phrase, not to be found either in Scripture, or any sober Writer, (though much in 40. Robert Markley, Fallen Languages, 2. 41. For additional arguments against nefarious eloquence by preachers sympathetic to the new experimentalism, see Isaac Barrow, Several Sermons against Evil-Speaking (London, 1678); Richard Allestree, The Government of the Tongue (London, 1667). On latitudinarianism, religion, and science in seventeenth-century England, see John Spurr, “Rational Religion in Restoration England,” Journal of the History of Ideas 49 (1988): 563–85; Lotte Mulligan, “Anglicanism, Latitudinarianism, and Science in 17th-Century England,” Annals of Science 30 (1973): 213–19; Barbara Shapiro, “Latitudinarianism and Science in Seventeenth-Century England,” Past and Present 40 (1968): 16–41; R. S. Westfall, Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1958). See also Brian Young, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Martin Griffin, Latitudinarianism in the Seventeenth-Century Church of England (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 1992).

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fashion amongst some men in these times), which, it may be, sounds well to vulgar ears; but being reduced into plain English, will appear to be wholly empty, and to signifie nothing, or else to be full of vain repetitions.42

The first type of affectation needs little explanation. Wilkins has in mind a courtly style that appears too easily as artifice. This is what Morris Croll refers to as the neo-Ciceronian style of the sixteenth century, and what Ian Robinson describes more accurately as the pseudo-Ciceronian style.43 It had already fallen out of favor by the beginning of the seventeenth century, and so this type of style is for Wilkins a side note. The second kind of rhetorical affectation proves more complicated, more dangerous to the good order of society, and far more pervasive—“much in fashion.” The “mystical kind of phrase” to which Wilkins refers is the language of the sorcerer and the enthusiastic spiritualist. Such rhetoric “signifie[s] nothing” for the Anglican bishop, except perhaps a pact with the Devil, as in the case of Macbeth’s troubled rhetoric. Wilkins’s conjunction of “signifie nothing” and “vain repetitions” (e.g., double, double) might very well be an obscure reference to Shakespeare’s meditation upon how demons and witches infect the human idiom. Even if the allusion seems strained, Wilkins’s broader message is unmistakable: many Interregnum writers suffer a nefarious influence in their rhetoric, as evidenced by their applications of mystical phrases not to be found “in Scripture.” Such phrases sound sacred, but, Wilkins suggests, are wholly empty, subverting divine eloquence under the guise of promoting it, in what amounts to an act of rhetorical topsyturvydom. Style is a dominant philosophical theme throughout the Discourse, not only as it relates to prayer and sermonizing, but also as it relates to communication in general. The book’s title is probably misleading, as Francis Christianson points out, because Wilkins argues for plainness in all areas of writing. He takes an interest in discourse broadly imagined. In fact, Christianson goes even farther: “There is 42. John Wilkins, A Discourse Concerning the Gift of Prayer (London, 1653), 48. 43. Morris Croll, Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm; Robinson, The Establishment of Modern English Prose, 142–43.

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little, if anything, in the resolutions of the Society concerning their discourse that is not already formulated here by Wilkins.”44 Such a claim is probably too bold, because Sprat’s plain style mandate is more developed than Wilkins’s, especially as his philosophy of rhetoric appears in this early book. Christianson is nonetheless right to notice Wilkins and Sprat’s shared interest in language reform. After all, Wilkins nominates Sprat to write the History, due in large part to their close friendship, not to mention their commensurable attitudes toward rhetoric. Wilkins advances a similar argument for plainness and against rhetorical sorcery in a sermon upon Ecclesiastes: Words being but the images of matter, and to be wholly given up to the study of these, what is it but Pygmalions phrenzy, to fall in love with a picture or image, as for Oratory which is the best skill about words, that hath by some Wisemen been esteemed but a voluptuary art, like to cookery, which spoils wholsome meats, and helps unwholesome, by the variety of sauces serving more to the pleasure of taste than the health of the body.45

The Bishop draws a contrast between the experimentalist’s attitude toward words and the magician’s, paraphrasing The Advancement of Learning in the process—Bacon’s Pygmalion argument.46 And like Bacon, Wilkins critiques the occult obsession with rhetorical charms. Extending the argument, Wilkins also provides the commonplace metaphor associating bad rhetoric with bad cookery. In the same way that devious cooks disguise bad food with savory sauces, so too do misguided orators make the worse appear the better reason, he suggests, disguising the bitter as the sweet. Analogically, the pot roast is the substance in this argument, while the sauce functions as ornament, which might give temporary pleasure, but affords no sustenance and in fact proves dangerous. Wilkins’s remark about 44. Christianson, “John Wilkins and the Royal Society’s Reform of Prose Style,” in John Wilkins and 17th-Century British Linguistics, ed. Joseph L. Subbiondo (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1992), 151. 45. Wilkins, Sermons Preached upon Several Occasions (London, 1682), 184–85. 46. In The Advancement of Learning, Bacon uses the image of Pygmalion as an emblem of “the first distemper of learning, when men study words and not matter,” with the caveat that magicians, astrologers, and alchemists are especially guilty of this offense (52).

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“odd humors” is especially interesting along these lines. The implication of this quasi-medical phrase is that certain unwholesome forms of rhetoric (sauces) corrupt the imagination and the nervous system, transporting people to dangerous places by disturbing the humors. For Wilkins, the problem of venomous rhetorical cookery is a serious one, as serious as venomous cookery itself. Indeed, the persistence of poisonous rhetoric explains for many Anglican philosophers how the English Civil War began. That is, intoxicating demonic eloquence—nonconformist eloquence—moved a lot of people falsely. Vapors (idioms) of the underworld overwhelmed a large congregation of Englishmen (i.e., disturbed the humors), which caused them to abandon Anglican orthodoxy and new science, preferring instead the path of mystical eloquence, which by latitudinarian standards poisoned the rational faculties and moved the will badly. Using the Pygmalion story in a sermonic setting, Wilkins also warns of rhetorical apostasy, especially in the behaviors of Christians who suffer from overly reverential attitudes toward relics, which Aquinas categorizes much earlier as a dangerous form of idolatry.47 Wilkins concerns himself with the worshipping of false idols, including the materia and forma of tropes. At the same time, he is unconcerned about the use of eloquence, as is evidenced by his own spectacular rhetoric. The turn of phrase that troubles Wilkins is a preternatural turn, an act that destabilizes learning’s advancement and the concomitant Anglican theology of style contained therein. Typical of Anglican rhetorical theory at the time, Wilkins also devotes attention to the related topics of iterative preaching and enthusiastically spontaneous preaching, warning against both practices in the Discourse Concerning the Gift of Preaching (1646): [Preaching] must be full, without empty and needless Tautologies, which are to be avoided in every solid business, much more in sacred. [And] to deliver things in a crude and confused matter, without digesting of them by previous meditation, will nauseate the hearers, and is as improper for the 47. Aquinas, Summa theologica, III: 25:6.

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edification of the minde, as raw meat is for the nourishment of the body. It must be sound and wholesome, not tainted with any erroneous corrupt doctrine, or the affectation of novelty. False opinions do many times insinuate themselves by the use of suspicious phrases. And ‘tis a dangerous fault, when men cannot content themselves with the wholesome sound of words, but do altogether affect new light and new language, which may in time destroy practicall Godlinesse and the power of Religion.48

First, the Bishop rejects “empty and needless Tautologies,” which his audience would have immediately apprehended as anti-Catholic, and they would have expected as much.49 Wilkins’s purpose is to differentiate between orthodox Anglican ceremony and alternative forms of iteration. While the former is marked by a plain attitude toward rhetoric and an “experimentall acquaintance” with truth, the latter appears unabashedly mystical.50 These troubled incantations, moreover, bring with them the possibility of demonic ritual disguised as true religion, a commonplace concern among theologians on all sides of the religious controversies, and a charge that the Anglicans regularly leveled against Catholic and Lutheran ceremonies. On the related topic of novel and spontaneous rhetoric, Wilkins has in mind Puritan preaching. The Puritans disavowed formulaic religious rhetoric, arguing that such practices were too much aligned with the apparatus of witchcraft. This included both Anglican and Catholic ceremonies. For the Puritan sensibility, set formulas interfered with the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and herein lies one of the major reasons why the Puritans preferred Ramus to classical rhetoric.51 They perceived in the classical canon of invention an artificiality that worked against God’s moving grace. Overly prescriptive heuristic procedures circumvented inspiration. Additionally, and of equal significance to the Puritans, classical philosophers took the audience’s disposition too seriously. It was the audience’s 48. Wilkins, A Discourse Concerning the Gift of Preaching (London, 1646), 129. 49. On Catholicism in seventeenth-century England, see Raymond Tumbleson, Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination: Nationalism, Religion, and Literature 1600– 1745 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 50. Wilkins, A Discourse Concerning the Gift of Preaching, 130. 51. On Ramistic rhetoric, see Ong, Ramus.

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responsibility to the Puritan preacher to be prepared to receive God’s wisdom, not the preacher’s responsibility to adjust the message to the audience. All of this is by way of suggesting that Bishop Wilkins confronts the nonconformist challenge to Anglican orthodox rhetoric, which manifests itself through unabashedly mystical theology and spontaneous eloquence, or what Milton referred to as “prompt eloquence” in Paradise Lost. On a side note (if I might digress for a moment), we discover in the Puritan rejection of classical heuristics the seeds of English Romanticism. The Romantic’s renewed interest in Cromwell and Interregnum rhetoric makes perfect sense from a philosophicalrhetorical standpoint, because the nonconformists foreshadow Romantic ideas of inspiration, not to mention Romantic ideas of science, where theosophy plays a crucial role. Enlightenment philosophers such as Bishop Burnet and John Toland represented as superstitious certain key aspects of Puritan furor, but Romantics like Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats took great encouragement from such charmed rhetoric. They embraced a mystical element in composition, celebrating enchanted modes of invention and inspiration, and therefore finding more in common with Renaissance mysticism than with Enlightenment science. Archbishop John Tillotson is perhaps the most influential writer on the topic of sermonic style in Restoration England.52 A member of the Royal Society and a Baconian philosopher, he defends the plain language reforms with the same vehemence as Wilkins and Sprat. The new “plain” style of preaching, and of writing more broadly, Tillotson argues, may correct the irregular humor and itch in many people who are not contented with this plain and wholesome food, but must be gratified with sublime notions and unintelligible mysteries, with pleasant passages of wit, 52. On Tillotson’s influence upon Restoration style, see Adolph, The Rise of Modern Prose Style. See also Mary Morrissey, “Scripture, Style, and Persuasion in SeventeenthCentury English Theories of Preaching,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53 (2002): 686– 706; Gerard Reedy, “Interpreting Tillotson,” Harvard Theological Review 86 (1993): 81–103; David Brown, “John Tillotson’s Revisions and Dryden’s ‘Talent for English Prose,’” Review of English Studies 1961 (45): 24–39.

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and artificial strains of rhetoric, with nice and unprofitable disputes, with bold interpretations of dark prophecies, and peremptory determinations of what will happen next year, and a punctual stating of the time when antichrist shall be thrown down.53

Tillotson contrasts properly plain language with mystical and ecstatic rhetoric. Among the types of esoterica at issue, he identifies those “bold interpretations” of “dark prophecies” that determine punctually “when antichrist shall be thrown down.” The Millenarians are the most notorious of the nonconformist apocalyptic philosophers of the Interregnum, and Tillotson no doubt has this group’s mystifying rhetoric in mind, at least in part.54 Millenarian apocalyptic expressions were commonplace in seventeenth-century eschatological writings (e.g., Joseph Mede, James Durham, John Napier), despite the fact that this sort of formulaic thought worked against the spirit of that most famous admonition in Matthew 25:13: “Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour the Son of man cometh.” For some of the more fervent eschatologists, this warning remained true only in a technical sense, with the emphasis upon day and hour. Tillotson undoubtedly refers to these adamant Millenarian discourses when he complains about “unintelligible mysteries” and “artificial strains of rhetoric.” The Millenarians, however, represent a small element of the seventeenth-century writers who took seriously the idea of an impending apocalypse. Not only does Tillotson target the peculiar pronouncements of Millenarians, who play a relatively minor role in debates about providential history, but he also targets the far more widespread eschatological sentiments of mainstream Anglican, Lutheran, Catholic, and Puritan theologians. A majority of theologians, conventional and radical, conformist and nonconformist, considered the real possibility of an imminent apocalypse in the middle of the seventeenth century. It is difficult to overstate the extent to 53. Tillotson, “The Necessity of Repentance and Faith,” in The Works of the Most Reverend John Tillotson (3 vols.; London, 1717), vol. 2, 11–17, 6. 54. On the millenarians, see Bryan Ball, A Great Expectation: Eschatological Thought in English Protestantism to 1660 (Leiden: Brill, 1975), 55–88; Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (Fairlawn, N.J.: Essential Books, 1957).

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which eschatology influenced English theology and rhetoric, beginning in earnest with the Reformation and extending into the Interregnum. As Bryan Ball shows, the belief in an imminent apocalypse was “nearly universal” among English Reformists: “At no other time in England’s history has the doctrine of the second advent been so widely or so readily accepted.”55 Stuart Clark makes a similar argument: “The advent of the Antichrist [in the form of the Papacy] was taken as the surest of many signs that the English Reformation was a part of that decisive battle between good and evil as described in Revelation.”56 Writers from various Protestant standpoints believed that the age of Antichrist had arrived on earth in the form of Catholic empire, an idea illustrated in Luther’s theology and Melancthon and Cranach’s hugely popular Passional Christi und Antichristi (1521). This same apocalyptic anxiety emerges in foundational English Protestant texts such as John Bale’s The Image of Bothe Churches (1545), Thomas Cranmer’s Catechismus (1548), John Cheke’s The Hurt of Sedition (1549), Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique (1560), and Hugh Latimer’s Sermons (1562). For many Catholics, too, the idea of the day of reckoning loomed large. The Reformation itself operated in the Catholic Counter Reformation as evidence of postremus furor Satanae, Satan’s final rage, where the Devil attempts to cause as much heresy as possible before God banishes him forever to hell—an idea based upon Revelation 12:12: “Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea, for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth he hath but a short time.” When Tillotson takes up the issue of apocalyptic rhetoric, he invokes this complex theological milieu that permeates the period’s religious debates. In one strong gesture, too, he dismisses most of the apocalyptic tradition as belonging to a credulous world of arcane signs and symbols that preceded the world of learning’s advancement. The cosmos had changed by the time Tillotson inherited the 55. Bryan Ball, Eschatological Thought in English Protestantism to 1660, 232. 56. Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 339. On rhetoric and apocalypse in Renaissance England, see Ryan J. Stark, “Thomas Wilson’s Apocalyptic Rhetoric,” Studies in Philology 106 (2009): forthcoming; Stark, “Protestant Theology and Apocalyptic Rhetoric in Roger Ascham’s The Schoolmaster,” Journal of the History of Ideas 69 (2008): 517–32.

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apocalyptic tradition. Or, more precisely, he and other new philosophers were in the process of changing the cosmos. Radical eschatological sentiments no longer seemed tenable, and the idiom in which they were written appeared increasingly obscure as the plain tropes of new philosophy took hold in English historiography, moving historiography closer to a progressive model and away from an Augustinian binary model, marked by the metaphysical and absolute struggle between good and evil in every epoch.57 This is not to say that Tillotson rejects the basic idea of eschatology. He does not, and neither do other members of the Royal Society. The book of Revelation is an important text in the late seventeenth century, as are other apocalyptic writings, but they are not as central. Like most Restoration philosophers working in the tradition of modern experimentalism, Tillotson perceives in the present age the dawn of a new golden era, where advances in science and art signal a major step forward in human development. Scientific optimism counteracts the twilight world of apocalypse that many English writers articulated consistently throughout the Renaissance. As a result, apocalyptic rhetoric suffers a profound loss in momentum in the late seventeenth century. The plain language reforms contribute significantly to this loss, because the new philosophers’ plain idiom contains as a presupposition a profound misgiving toward eschatological portents and symbols, including astrological portents, which is to say that the decline of academic astrology and the rise of the new plain style are intimately related. While apocalyptic rhetoric finds expression in every age, it becomes in the Enlightenment an increasingly peripheral practice. Perhaps a work like Pope’s Dunciad provides a counterpoint, especially the fourth book. But in Pope’s mock epic, the apocalypse functions as a literary device more than a real possibility. Colley Cibber is the Antichrist of wit, but not by any stretch is he the Antichrist of the universe. Pope warns England about reason’s collapse, but his satirical method dissipates the sober idea of the world’s epilogue, which as a 57. On this shift in historiography, see Blair Worden, “The Question of Secularization,” in A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration, ed. Alan Houston and Steve Pincus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 20–40.

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concept seems far removed from the Age of Reason and Pope’s balanced couplets contained therein. The apocalyptic rhetoric of Renaissance theology appears increasingly as a period style to advancers of learning, a set of tropes and ideas best suited to a particularly enthusiastic stretch of time that the Restoration Anglicans desired to obscure through an official Act of Oblivion and other efforts to start anew with socio-historical tabulae rasae. The rhetoric of apocalypse begins to fade in the Restoration, at least in mainstream Anglican circles, and this includes Tillotson’s circle. Tillotson also packs into the passage above another intriguing trope, and this is the commonplace metaphorical distinction between the “wholesome food” of good rhetoric and the unwholesome food of bad rhetoric. Although a full survey of food metaphors and rhetoric in the seventeenth century has yet to be completed, the metaphor of bad rhetoric as bad food is probably the third most commonly used trope to disparage inappropriate styles in the middle of the seventeenth century, behind bad rhetoric as witchery and bad rhetoric as harlotry, two manifestations of demonic inversion. Significantly, all three of these images, witches, harlots, and bad cooks, have in common the bedrock association of the demonic, though the bad food metaphor is less overt than the others. Nonetheless, embedded deeply in the routine references to unwholesome food and bad rhetoric are the dual and related Anglican anxieties over sophistry’s pharmacy and Catholicism’s transubstantiation. The first, the pharmacy, goes back at least as far as Plato’s critique of Gorgias. Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and other inventors of the rhetorical tradition held that certain kinds of styles functioned as dangerous drugs, corrupting the psyches and nervous systems of audiences and orators alike, especially if consumed uncritically. This is a sensible belief, then and now. Some forms of rhetoric poison the system. In this light, Tillotson’s phrase “irregular humor and itch” sounds like a medical diagnosis, and it probably is. He suggests that consumers of enchanted rhetoric put themselves in physical danger by virtue of their perverse appetites, or, worse yet, have already been corrupted by the drug of diabolical language. In either case, the outcome 80   l anguage reform

is deleterious. Bad rhetoric, like bad food, perverts healthy living. The second connotation of unwholesome food that lingers in the background of Tillotson’s metaphor is that of Catholic transubstantiation. In Catholic doctrine, the bread and the wine of communion literally turn into the body and the blood of Christ. The Catholic Council of Lateran in 1215 articulated the details of this position, just as the mystical rhetoric of the early Italian Renaissance burgeoned. The accidental properties of taste and texture persisted in the bread and wine, as the doctrine indicates, but in a deeper sense, though still in a literal sense, the very nature of the sacraments changes into the actual body and blood of Christ. Moreover, transubstantiation occurs at that very moment when the priest utters sacred words. This makes communion the most prominent of all mystical (not magical) rhetorical ceremonies in Catholicism, and consequently the most prominent of all mystical rhetorical ceremonies in European Renaissance society. To Tillotson’s Anglican sensibility, however, the Catholic ritual of communion appeared as one more form of nefarious preternatural magic, indistinguishable in category from the rhetorical behaviors of necromancers, alchemists, and witches. Unlike the Catholics, the Anglicans took a purely symbolic view of communion, while the Lutherans found a middle ground, perceiving in the sacrament consubstantiation, not transubstantiation. All of this is by way of preface to say that Tillotson alludes to Catholic communion when he describes those who “must be gratified with sublime notions and unintelligible mysteries,” instead of nourishing food. The mystery of transubstantiation is for Tillotson and other latitudinarian philosophers one more example of an “unintelligible [rhetorical] mystery,” and this is due to the mystical philosophy of rhetoric at work in the ceremony, which strikes the Anglican sensibility as a form of fiendish metonyming.58 Against enchanted rhetorical remedies of all sorts, Tillotson juxtaposes the new plain style, a wholesome form of rhetoric by the standards of his theologically minded food analogy. Not all bad-rhetoric-as-bad-food metaphors in the middle of 58. See also Tillotson, A Discourse against Transubstantiation (London, 1684).

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seventeenth-century England involve demonry, occult pharmacology, or transubstantiation, but many do, at least on the subtextual level and from the standpoint of the Royal Society’s mainstream philosophers. The Anglican Henry More provides another illustration, invoking a food metaphor with occult overtones: “Enthusiasm,” he argues, is “an affection of Humor and Rhetorick,” and it is marked by a “desire to be filled with high-swoln words of vanity, rather than to feed on sober truth, and to heat and warm our selves rather by preposterous and fortuitous imaginations, than to move cautiously in the light of a purified mind and improved reason.”59 Consuming the food of bad rhetoric puts one at risk of having one’s perceptions turned upside down. More’s use of the term “preposterous” is especially notable here, because it recalls the rhetorical inversions of witchcraft, which he aims to connect with nonconformist ranting. Put differently, More complains about those English enthusiasts who feed on honey dew and drink the milk of paradise. His advice about producing and consuming such imaginative rhetoric is simple: Beware, beware! Cowley provides a similar warning, comparing bad rhetoric to bad food in his ode to the Royal Society. Both substances produce “Pageants of the brain,” rather than the sound rationality that comes from proper rhetorical sustenance (e.g., the new plain style).60 Notably, too, Cowley invokes an upside-down universe—the pageant—as a part of his broader rejection of diabolical rhetoric, in this case juxtaposing the perverse consumption of the Renaissance masquerade with the proper consumption of new science. Using the striking antithesis, he also reveals the Royal Society’s efforts to calm social misrule through the healthy influence of plain rhetoric. This is Tillotson’s point as well: the alternative to debauched rhetorical nourishment, or demonic rhetoric, is the purified food of new philosophy, which finds its analogue in the Royal Society’s plain language program. Plainness heals, Tillotson contends, while esoteric rhetoric corrupts physiological, social, and spiritual systems. In his Discourse of the Pastoral Care (1692), Bishop Gilbert Burnet 59. Henry More, Observations upon anthroposophia theomagica and anima magica abscondita (London, 1650), A3v. 60. Cowley, “To the Royal Society,” in The History of the Royal Society, Preface.

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also puts magic and mysticism at the crux of the plain language controversies, noting how mystical rhetoric threatened “plain Notions” of preaching in the Interregnum and the early Restoration: Mystical Applications of Scripture grew to be better liked than clear Texts; an Accumulation of Figures, a Cadence in the Periods, a playing upon the Sound of Words, a Loftiness of Epithets, and often an Obscurity of Expression, were according to the different tastes of several Ages run into. Preaching has passed through many different forms among us since the Reformation. But without flattering the present Age, or any person now alive, too much, it must be considered, that it is brought of late to a much greater Perfection than it ever was before among us. It is certainly brought nearer the Pattern that S. Chrysostom has set, or perhaps carried beyond it. Our Language is much refined, and we have returned to the plain Notions of simple and genuine Rhetorick.61

Burnet takes bad mysticism to be the root cause of England’s rhetorical and social problems. The symptomatic and secondary troubles of cadence and obscurity flow from it. And the cure, as he figures it, is to adopt plain notions of rhetoric, not esoteric notions. Burnet preached Robert Boyle’s and Tillotson’s funeral sermons, and he was a longstanding member of the Royal Society. It is fair to say that he participated firsthand in the plain language reforms. Philosophers of rhetoric, therefore, do not get an impartial report from him, but we discover a coherent rationale for the plain style movement from the standpoint of the plain language reformers themselves. By the time Burnet wrote the Discourse, this rationale against rhetorical enchantment rang true in the society at large. On the cusp of the eighteenth century, the darksome rhetoric of the old world was giving way to the polite, cool, plain rhetoric of the new epoch, at least in typical intellectual circles, which then spread the new philosophy of plainness to the increasingly large and literate public. Ideas of mystical metonyms and occult paronomasias faded in latitudinarian discourses. Astrology, magic, witchcraft, and other esoteric systems of thought, of course, persisted in eighteenth-century English culture, 61. Gilbert Burnet, A Discourse of the Pastoral Care (London, 1692), 215–16.

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and beyond, and these systems still have numerous high-profile supporters today, as enchanted philosophy does in every age. It would be a mistake, therefore, to talk about the collapse of charmed rhetoric in an unqualified way. In the context of Burnet’s treatise, however, illuminists and magicians no longer posed the strong challenge to the new experimentalism that they did in the early and middle parts of the seventeenth century. Mystical and magical worldviews were no longer a central topic in the academic discussion about truth and reality, as they were, for instance, during the Royal Society’s inception of plainness. Those advocating rhetorical plainness (i.e., non-enchanted stylistics) won the philosophical battle, more or less, not in an absolutist Hegelian sense, where the innovative Zeitgeist replaces the old Zeitgeist (and the new period style eliminates the contingencies of the old period style), but in a Thomas Kuhnian sense of paradigm shift, where the old paradigms remain thoroughly intact but lose considerable esteem in mainstream intellectual society, for better or worse.62 Burnet’s optimism, too, is notable. The new philosophy of plainness has “carried beyond” even the best rhetoric of antiquity. For Burnet, the modern plain style is poised to usher in a new era—an Age of Reason. The Bishop anticipates this turn. Indeed, he advances it, celebrating plainness and perspicuity in preaching, both of which work against the metaphysical conceits and occult verisimilitudes of early seventeenth-century religious discourses. This feeling of progress in Burnet also and significantly contradicts the end-ofthe-world scenarios posited by the apocalyptic philosophers, those who believed that Antichrist had arrived on earth, which meant that the Second Coming would not be far behind. In a striking counterstatement to end-of-the-world angst (including those “peremptory determinations” discussed by Tillotson), Burnet sees the front cusp 62. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). See also Margaret Osler, “Rethinking the Scientific Revolution,” in Rethinking the Scientific Revolution, ed. Margaret Osler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 3–24; Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), 346–60; Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 65–75; Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

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of a golden age where language is refined to “a much greater Perfection than it ever was before.” He detects the progress of learning, not civilization’s collapse. That is, Burnet looks forward, as do the other plain language reformers of the late seventeenth century.

Conclusion Near the end of The Establishment of Modern English Prose, Robinson comments upon Oliver Cromwell’s mystical rhetoric. Referring to a heartfelt letter that Cromwell writes about the death of one of his soldiers, Robinson makes the following point about the Protector’s writing style: The Lord’s name is frequently on Cromwell’s lips, for which A. L. Rowse (for instance) can hardly mention him without accusing him of hypocrisy. [Cromwell’s writing] doesn’t sound like the style of a hypocrite. But nor does it sound quite like modern prose, though not for any technical reason. Neither unembarrassed emotion nor a sense of the presence of God are associated with modern prose. Cromwell is a world away from Restoration prose, a thousand miles from the coffee house and quite without the bows and scrapes Addison manages to set down on paper. The connection with the Bible is the reverse of a weakness. Cromwell really did pant for happiness in the Lord! No writer at the court of Charles II could have used glory so without embarrassment and so convincingly.63

This passage is the theoretical monad of Robinson’s book, even though he presents it as an afterthought, probably because his interpretation in the passage departs severely from the rhythmicsyntactical approach to seventeenth-century stylistic reform governing most of the book. As Robinson notes, Cromwell does not sound like a modern writer, “though not for any technical reason.” In other words, Cromwell’s style is not really plain or perspicacious in the modern sense, even though it appears that way technically. What might this mean? Cromwell’s rhetorical style still participates in a mystical world where the Spirit of God informs daily living, including daily writing, and this mystical aura comes through in the 63. Robinson, The Establishment of Modern English Prose, 138.

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language, especially when he uses terms like “glory” with neither embarrassment nor Restoration restraint. We discover in Cromwell an excellent example of nonconformist spirited rhetoric, which has more in common with metaphysical and occult temperaments than with the plain temperaments of the new experimentalists. Donne and Cromwell, for example, are much closer to each other than either writer is to Wilkins, Sprat, or Locke. Cromwell’s eloquence, in fact, functions as one of several foils for the rise of the new plain style. Members of the Royal Society and other like-minded philosophers successfully targeted such numinous sensibilities, building a modern style against them. Robinson foreshadows his discussion of Cromwell by noting that John Bramhall’s rhetoric might very well be construed as the forerunner of Dryden’s proto-Enlightenment style, given Bramhall’s masterful ability to write prose in a way that estimates ordinary speech. At the same time, as Robinson argues, “Bramhall has a genuine religious feeling that divides him decisively from Dryden.”64 Robinson is right. Moreover, it is precisely this sort of thing—a particular type of religious feeling—that philosophers of rhetoric need to articulate more clearly in such circumstances, if the language reforms of the early modern period are to be properly conceptualized, and if the emergence of modern English writing is to be apprehended for what it is: a movement against enchanted rhetoric in all of its forms, mystical and magical. For the intuitive critic who apprehends not only the shape of the sentence but also the shape of the world in which the sentence functions, the aura of Bramhall’s writings is easily distinguishable from the aura of Dryden’s writings, not necessarily because of syntactical differences, but because of thermalmystical differences. On the level of mere sentence structure, Bramhall has far more in common with Dryden than he does with Browne or Vaughan, but such a syntactical focus proves entirely misleading. Put simply, there is a numinous warmth in Bramhall that does not exist in Dryden’s austere writings.65 How might philosophers of 64. Ibid., 122. 65. I am thinking of Dryden’s writings before 1685, though the Catholic Dryden remains a rationalist and an experimentalist in the tradition of Descartes.

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rhetoric discover such warmth in a case like this? Perhaps a heuristic procedure implied in Robinson’s discussion of Cromwell is a good place to start. Can the author say the word “glory” without embarrassment? We need an understanding of a sentence’s Weltanschauung in order to determine its stylistic implications, in addition to a more easily discoverable syntax gauge that measures types of clauses. A syntactical gauge in itself is of very little use, and has produced much confusion in rhetorical studies. In the absence of a broader philosophy of style, the shape of syntax, use of particular tropes, and proclivity for certain types of clauses tell us very little about a writer’s attitude toward style and, concomitantly, toward the world.

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Chapter 3

N at ural M agic

)( Natural magical rhetoric and witchcraft are important types of discourse in the seventeenth-century milieu. If language reform is to be properly understood, we need to have a clear understanding of how these rhetorical practices functioned at the time. This brings me to the next two chapters, this one on natural magic and the following on witchery. In this chapter, I examine some of the controversies surrounding charmed language in early modern England, concentrating especially upon Rosicrucian spell casting, one of the most formidable idioms against which the new experimentalists advanced the new plain style. I argue specifically that incommensurability in philosophy of rhetoric divides the magicians and the modern scientists, which calls into serious question the recurrent thesis that Renaissance magic somehow evolved into the new experimentalism.1 It did not. It 1. Frances Yates is the major proponent of this theory. She expressed the idea in several books and articles, the most influential of which is probably The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 1972).

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could not, due in large part to the magicians’ occult philosophy of rhetoric. While practitioners of magic described themselves as using only the organic power of tropes to work wonders—which usually included astrological ideas—new scientists characterized the socalled “natural magicians” as applying preternatural methods, for example, watchwords, emblems, and other incantatory paraphernalia used to conjure demons. For most new philosophers, natural magical rhetoric appeared as one more version of witchcraft, despite the magicians’ vehement protests to the contrary.

Magical Philosophy of Rhetoric Using nature’s hidden yet organic properties, Renaissance magicians claimed to manipulate various superlunary and sublunary energies in order to effect changes in the world.2 Language operated as the key instrument. “Words,” the Renaissance sorcerer Cornelius Agrippa suggests, “are like secrets or sacraments, and are vehicles, as it were, of their material referenda and of the essences and powers these contain.”3 For Agrippa and other magicians, words “carried” with them “the vertue of the speaker with a certain efficacy unto the hearers, and this oftentimes with so great a power, that oftentimes they change not only the hearers, but also their bodies, and things that have no life.”4 Put differently, language contained the power to transmogrify reality, when figured properly by the expert 2. For an introduction to Renaissance magic, see B. K. Ridley, On Science (London: Routledge, 2001), especially chapters 4–5; Brian Copenhaver, “The Occultist Tradition and its Critics,” in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 454–512; Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons; Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Renaissance (New York: Routledge, 1979); Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic; D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic: From Ficino to Campanella (London: Warburg Institute, 1958). See also Brian Gibbons, Spirituality and the Occult: From the Renaissance to the Modern Age (New York: Routledge, 2001), 1–55; Penelope Gouk, Music, Science, and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), 157–93; William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 194–233; Wayne Shumaker, Occult Sciences in the Renaissance: A Study in Intellectual Patterns (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). 3. Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, trans. John French (London, 1651), 152. 4. Ibid.

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magician, who by implication was also an expert rhetorician. This included not only the reality of the human heart, but also the reality of rocks, trees, and animals, as in the case of Amphion’s eloquence. For Renaissance magicians, ancient stories about words shaking the world were not fairy tales, but were instead accurate accounts of effective rhetorical magic.5 As Brian Vickers aptly characterizes Renaissance language magic, “to rearrange words is to rearrange reality.”6 D. P. Walker offers a similar observation, noting that magical rhetoric in the period “rests on a theory of language according to which there is a real, not conventional, connection between the words and what they denote,” which is to say that “the word is not merely like a quality of the thing it designates, such as its color or weight; [rather], it is, or exactly represents, its essence.”7 “A formula of words,” in other words, “may not only be an adequate substitute for the things denoted, but may [also] be more powerful.”8 For Renaissance magicians, formulas of words constituted and reconstituted the world through charmed linguistic procedures. Magical rhetoric created reality and was, in fact, a fabric of reality, far beyond modern correspondence theories of language, and far beyond conventional understandings of tropes as mere ornaments. The magician’s methods of arrangement, delivery, and style were the catalysts for such transmogrification. This is and has always been the claim of natural magicians, as opposed to the claim of witches, for instance, who appeal to preternatural sources, such as demons and the Devil himself. Unlike magicians, witches have never professed to rely upon the world’s organic spiritual properties, the spiritus mundi of the occult Renaissance cosmos. 5. Most magicians were Christian in temperament and traced their own enchanted rhetoric back to the ultimate source of creative language, the Word that created the world, as described in John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Psalm 33:6 was also a popular verse among mystics and magicians who had an interest in the power of rhetoric: “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth.” 6. Vickers, “Analogy versus Identity,” 106. 7. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic, 80–1. 8. Ibid.

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Renaissance magicians believed that their vital rhetorical powers came from the natural spiritual properties of the cosmos, not from pacts with demons. This is a crucial point. It goes to the crux of magic. Natural sorcerers dissociated themselves from diabolical conjurors. They saw themselves instead as experimentalists in a noble tradition stretching back for thousands of years, a tradition that Gabriel Naudé famously defended early in the seventeenth century, placing within it figures such as Moses, Plato, Merlin, and Joan of Arc, an unusual hodgepodge by modern standards, but one that made perfect sense to the sorcerers of the age.9 Most of the modern experimentalists, however, ardently objected to such ideas of organic spell casting, primarily because magicians undermined the experimentalists’ philosophy of language. According to most modern scientists, magicians only pretended toward naturalism, all the while drawing upon nefarious forces (e.g., demons, succubae) to manipulate the world through enthralling rhetoric. By scientific precepts, natural magicians were witches and warlocks, some of them disguised as benevolent, but with malicious intentions, and others simply victims of a demonic ruse, convinced by their own seemingly organic powers, but, in fact, unwittingly engaged in implicit covenants with the Prince of Darkness.10 Several types of magical rhetoric circulated in middle and late seventeenth-century England, but Rosicrucian sorcery is especially significant, because it was this occult system of thought against which many of the modern philosophers made their arguments. The controversy between Rosicrucianism and new science was central to Interregnum and Restoration intellectual debates. While as9. Gabriel Naudé, The History of Magick by Way of Apology, trans. J. Davies (London, 1657). Naudé’s importance in the history of rhetoric has little to do with his defense of magic. Rather, most relevant is his effort to posit a theory of spell casting based upon the traditional canons of rhetoric. As Lynn Thorndike explains in A History of Magic and Experimental Science (8 vols.; New York: Macmillan, 1923–58), Naudé left “no stone unturned in his effort to be thought a [natural] magician,” and so “published a Rhetoric in five parts: the art of Trithemius for invention, theurgy for elocution, the art of Armadel for disposition, and Pauline art for pronunciation, and the Lullian art for memory” (vol. 7, 301–2). On Naudé and magic, see Lauren Kassell, “Magic and the Past in Early Modern England,” Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2006): 107–22. 10. Casaubon, ed., A True and Faithful Relation (London, 1659), Preface.

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trologers, magicians, and alchemists participated in what Francis Yates describes as “the Rosicrucian Enlightenment,” most new philosophers dissociated themselves from the Rosicrucians’ esoteric worldview.11 And this included a striking dissociation on the level of rhetorical style, where—against the realm of spell casting—modern philosophers advanced a new plain sensibility (i.e., non-occult stylistics). Yates and her followers, however, disagree with such a firm distinction between Renaissance magic and the new experimentalism, crediting Rosicrucianism instead with the rise of new science, in what amounts to a blurring of the line between scientific and occult mentalities. Hugh Ormsby-Lennon, for example, hears in the Royal Society’s language reforms the “odd echoes of Rosicrucian linguistics.”12 More specifically, he compares Sprat’s desire for primitive purity to the Rosicrucian search for Adam’s prelapsarian vocabulary, suggesting that the Royal Society’s language program owes a positive debt to Rosicrucian rhetoric. I accept OrmsbyLennon’s point that Rosicrucian rhetoric influenced the Royal Society’s plain language reforms. It did so, however, by operating as a formidable foil against which plainness emerged. This is a type of inspiration, but only in the negative sense. Members of the Royal Society differentiate the new plain style from the magical rhetoric of the Rosicrucians, which Glanvill refers to disapprovingly as “rosieCrucian Vapours.”13 The Royal Society’s stylistic reforms provide the framework in which occult philosophy of rhetoric appears as such in late seventeenth-century England, and this encompasses Rosi11. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. See also Stanley Beeler, A Study of the Three Original Rosicrucian Texts (New York: AMS, 1991); A. E. Waite, The Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross (London: Rider, 1924). 12. Hugh Ormsby-Lennon, “Rosicrucian Linguistics,” in Hermeticism and the Renaissance, ed. Ingrid Merkel and A. G. Debus (Washington, D.C.: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1988), 330. Yates foreshadows Ormsby-Lennon’s argument. See Yates, “The Occult Tradition in Renaissance Science,” in Art, Science, and History in the Renaissance, ed. Charles Singleton (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967). See also A. G. Debus, Man and Nature in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); P. M. Rattansi, “The Intellectual Origins of the Royal Society,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society 23 (1968): 129–43. 13. Glanvill, Plus ultra, 12.

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crucian linguistics.14 The idea of a positive progression from Rosicrucianism to experimentalism is impossible, because the modern philosophers’ concept of style contains as a presupposition the rejection of magical rhetoric. Style is a major sticking point between the world of magic and the world of new science, a point of fundamental incommensurability. The first English translation of the two central books of Rosicrucianism—the Fama fraternitatis (1614) and the Confessio fraternitatis (1615)—appeared in 1652, under the single title The Fame and Confession of the Fraternity of R.C. Commonly of the Rosie Cross, known also as the Fama and Confessio.15 Thomas Vaughan translated the books through the pseudonym Eugenius Philalethes, and Elias Ashmole helped with the translation and was instrumental in introducing Rosicrucian thought to Interregnum and Restoration England. Ashmole’s role is especially complex. Perhaps more than any other member of the Royal Society, Ashmole promoted the sort of occult philosophy that worked against the plain language reforms, and so he functioned as an exception to the general rule that members of the Royal Society rejected magical rhetoric. Most of them did, but not all of them. Because figures like Vaughan and Ashmole circulated Rosicrucian philosophy, the topic of Rosicrucian occultism soon became popular in intellectual circles. Of particular interest to philosophers of rhetoric and science, the anonymous author of the Fama and Confessio forwards a magical idea of language, suggesting that Rosicrucians 14. Newton’s often-discussed interest in magic takes clearer shape in light of this point. His philosophy of rhetoric—in tune with the Royal Society’s language program— belongs to the modern world. This is not to say that Newton was unimpressed by magic, or uninfluenced by it, but he certainly was not a language magician in the tradition of Agrippa and Ficino. For more on this controversial topic, see A. P. Coudert, “Newton and the Rosicrucian Enlightenment,” in Newton and Religion: Context, Nature, and Influence, ed. J. E. Force and R. H. Popkin (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), 17–44; J. Bono, “From Paracelsus to Newton: The Word of God, the Book of Nature, and the ‘Eclipse of the Emblematic Worldview,’” in Newton and Religion: Context, Nature, and Influence, 45–76. See also James Gleik, Isaac Newton (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003); Michael White, Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer (London: Fourth Estate, 1997); Richard Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 15. Thomas Vaughan, trans., The Fame and Confession of the Fraternity of R.C. Commonly of the Rosie Cross (London, 1652).

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had come to understand the prelapsarian words and tropes of Adam, which were thought to exist in the postlapsarian world, though wellhidden in the babble of sublunary existence. In Confessio, the author explains this pursuit of magical writing: “we have borrowed our magick writing” from the “characters or letters” that God “imprinted ..... into the wonderful creation of heaven and earth,” which were the same characters and letters that “Adam” used in his prelapsarian state.16 The alleged discovery of a prelapsarian idiom stirred the imaginations of Interregnum occultists. Most of them took the Rosicrucian claim of linguistic wizardry to heart. They found in the Fama and Confessio testimony verifying the existence of a naturally enchanted discourse that, if properly comprehended, promised a profound degree of control over the world. This included control over the body politic, an argument that magicians made throughout the seventeenth century, usually in front of wealthy courts. The Fama and Confessio provides no indication of how Rosicrucian magical language actually functions, or how it might be used in specific circumstances. The anonymous author nonetheless insists that such knowledge is commonplace among the Rosicrucian Society’s membership, just as he insists that the Society had also unlocked the mystery of the philosopher’s stone, and, moreover, had discovered a magical salt that prolonged life, perhaps indefinitely. These references give the book an added layer of mystery, or an added layer of implausibility. The nonconformist mystic John Webster practiced Rosicrucian magic, as did the wizard John Heydon. And we discover in their peculiar works a considerable degree of enthusiasm toward magical rhetoric, if not a coherent explanation of it. The “Macrocosm” of the cosmos, Webster writes, is “the great unsealed book of God, and every creature ..... a Capital Letter or Character, and all put together make up one word or sentence of his immense wisdome, glory and power.”17 All of reality is for Webster the unfolding of a magical sentence, which among other things recalls the linguistic implication 16. Ibid., 48. 17. John Webster, Academiarum examen (London, 1653), 28.

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embedded in Macbeth’s final soliloquy—“To the last syllable of recorded time” (VI.vi.21). In a moment of revelation, Webster, like the character of Macbeth, sees the cosmos as a charmed utterance, rather than a mathematical formula (as in Galileo’s argument).18 They—Webster and Macbeth—activate ideas of occult grammar and rhetoric, both accepting the bedrock notion that the world is built upon enchanted phrases. Time is the unfolding of tropes, those types, or original patterns, initially inscribed by God at the beginning of the world. The additional caveat is that a magician’s mastery of such a rhetorical vocabulary promises a great deal of power, reality-shaping power. This is precisely what Webster claims for himself and other astrologers and alchemists, and it is also what Heydon claims for himself in the often-impenetrable Theomagia (1663), a Restoration guidebook for Rosicrucian magicians. Heydon’s primary purpose in Theomagia is to explain how spell casters imbue words and charms with the mysterious forces of planetary conjunctions, using incantations and a variety of other occult rituals to do so, some of them unseemly.19 For example, Heydon describes how pricking the fingers (under certain celestial conjunctions) and then inscribing bloody figures on paper enables the magician to contact chthonic and ethereal spirits.20 Of specific interest—and tellingly—Heydon highlights the close correlation between Rosicrucian magic and ancient astrology, which perhaps explains why Rosicrucianism declined along with academic astrology in late seventeenth-century scientific circles. Many of the Rosicrucians (including Webster and Heydon) owe a particularly notable debt to the renowned alchemist Oswald Croll, 18. Galileo states, “Philosophy is written in this grand book—I mean the universe— which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth” (Stillman Drake and C. D. O’Malley, trans., Controversy on the Comets of 1618 [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960], 183–84). 19. John Heydon, Theomagia (London, 1663), 1–25. See also Heydon, The Voyage to the Land of the Rosicrucians (London, 1660). 20. Heydon, Theomagia, 2–3.

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who warrants mentioning, if only briefly. Croll’s work experiences a revival in the late seventeenth century, especially among students of esoterica. The reason for this revival is straightforward. Croll’s occult philosophy complemented the Rosicrucian search for Adam’s original language: “Every creature is a book of God” written in “Natural Signatures ..... by which all things occult are read and understood,” the alchemist suggests, adding that these mysterious “Characters” are “not with Inke” imprinted upon the world, but rather “with the very finger of God.”21 For Croll, the book of nature is emblazoned with magical words. Moreover, he asserts that a prelapsarian rhetorical code continues to function in the postlapsarian world, promising to the astute alchemist substantial control over the universe’s original mechanisms. As Owen Hannaway observes, “Similitude and analogy [and other tropes] were not for Croll figures of speech which illuminated the essentially incomparable; they were the very fabric and glue of the universe and the means by which it spoke.”22 Set against Galileo’s remark about the primacy of mathematics, the book of nature for Croll and other like-minded occult philosophers is written in the vocabulary of numinous tropes, and its components are metonym, metaphor, synecdoche, irony, paronomasia, and the like, not the triangles and circumferences to which Galileo refers. Moreover, it is fair to say that for Croll and other Renaissance alchemists the book of nature cannot be read truly or fully without these rhetorical capabilities. Rhetoric is a cosmological architectonic in occult philosophy. For new scientists and writers influenced by them, however, tropes had only figurative significance, not ontological significance. Experimentalists evacuated from the rhetorical tradition the metaphysical verisimilitudes and cosmic correspondences of the enchanted Renaissance cosmos, which is how the occult analogies of Rosicrucian magic became the mere analogies of learning’s advancement. 21. Oswald Croll, “A Treatise of Oswaldus Crollius of Signatures of Internal Things,” in Royal and Practical Chymistry (London, 1670), A3v. 22. Owen Hannaway, The Chemists and the Word: The Didactic Origins of Chemistry (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 107.

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Modern Philosophical Attitudes toward Magical Rhetoric How did Rosicrucian philosophy of rhetoric influence the language reformers of the Royal Society? Most of the Royal Society’s philosophers were certainly aware of the Fama and Confessio. They were also equally apprehensive about such magical thinking, due in large part to the Rosicrucians’ charmed philosophy of language. In Plus ultra, for example, Glanvill praises the Royal Society for “laying aside” the “delusory Designs,” “vain Transmutations,” “Magical Charms,” and “rosie-Crucian Vapours” of occultists who depart from “God’s Great Book, Universal Nature.”23 Glanvill’s use of “transmutation” is particularly apt in this context. The term is a synonym for metonymy, a definition made clear in Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique (1560).24 Using the phrase “vain Transmutations,” Glanvill warns experimentalists against the practice of periaptic metonyming, and—more generally—he warns advancers of learning against occult rhetoric, where tropes operate as enchanted formulas, rather than plain ornaments. Glanvill succinctly provides the best rationale for why new philosophers reject Rosicrucian rhetoric, that is, because they reject ideas of charmed tropology. Bishop Wilkins also cautions his readers on the topic of “Cabbalistical” and “Chymical Rosicrucian Theology,” juxtaposing the new plain style against such occult rhetoric.25 The mathematician Seth Ward makes a similar argument—fervently disavowing Webster’s magical philosophy of language. In particular, he critiques Webster’s Rosicrucian search for “the Paradisical language of the outflown word which Adam understood while he was unfaln in Eden.”26 For Webster, the mastery of a prelapsarian vocabulary promises control over “those central mysteries that lay hid in the heavenly magick, which was in that ineffable word ..... wrapped up in the bosom of the eternal essence,” a powerful form of knowledge, presumably.27 23. Glanvill, Plus ultra, 12. 24. Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, 175. 25. John Wilkins, Ecclesiastes (London, 1669), 315. 26. Seth Ward, Vindiciae academiarum (Oxford, 1654), 27. 27. Ibid.

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Ward has an entirely different idea in mind. He describes Webster as a “credulous and fanatick Reformer,” especially because “he doth assent to the highly illuminated fraternity of the Rosycrucians in his large encomiums upon Jacob Behem, in that reverence which he profeses to judiciall Astrologie.”28 Puzzling over why Webster falls under the spells of magicians, Ward again mentions Rosicrucianism in a negative way: “I have an itching desire to know what Lilly, and Booker, Behmen, and all the families of Magicians, Soothsayers, Canters, and Rosycrucians, have done to vex [Webster].”29 In a typical maneuver, Ward connects the “families of Magicians” to diabolical spell casters, as is evidenced by the word “vex,” a direct reference to witchcraft. The Rosicrucian “canting Discourse” is a “lose and wild kind of vaporing,” by Ward’s standards, not because it is elaborate per se, but rather because it is preternaturally enchanted (i.e., aided by demonic spirits).30 Unconcerned about eloquent syntax, use of metaphors, and the like, Ward attacks bewitchment in this argument against Webster’s Rosicrucian rhetoric. Tropes in and of themselves are of no consequence, and neither is the rhetorical tradition. For Ward, as for other new experimentalists in tune with the Baconian advancement of learning, philosophy of rhetoric is the crucial point of contention. The Anglican Bishop Samuel Parker joins the modern empirical invective against Rosicrucian rhetoric. The Rosicrucians “pretend to be Natures Secretaries,” Parker observes, but in truth they put off with nothing but Rampant Metaphors, and Pompous Allegories, and other splendid but empty Schemes of Speech....... I must crave leave to account them (to say no worse) Poets and Romancers, true Philosophie is too sober to descend to these wildernesses of Imagination, and too rational to be cheated by them....... Her Game is things not words.31

For Parker, Rosicrucian rhetoric corrupts properly plain rhetoric: “[The Rosicrucians’] wanton & luxuriant fancies climbing up into the Bed of Reason do not only defile it by unchaste and illegitimate 28. Ibid., 5. 29. Ibid., 46. 30. Ibid., 5, 12–14. 31. Parker, A Free and Impartial Censure of the Platonick Philosophie (Oxford, 1666), 63.

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Embraces, but instead of real conceptions and notices of things, impregnate the mind with nothing but Ayrie and Subventaneous Phantasmes.”32 But what of Parker’s own “Rampant Metaphors” in this instance? He appears to be entirely overtaken by figurative rhetoric, using images of game playing and romance to question Rosicrucian eloquence. What should be done with his wildly metaphorical rejection of metaphors? Like all of the other metaphorical statements against metaphors by new experimentalists, this one too should be set in a philosophical light. Put simply, Parker rejects superstitious metaphors, especially those informed by the Rosicrucian worldview. At the same time, he celebrates the plain use of metaphors, as is evidenced by his own exuberant—and perhaps exorbitant—rhetoric. Parker uses mere metaphors, rather than magical metaphors. His argument against Rosicrucian rhetoric is philosophical in nature. Here as elsewhere plainness is an ontological idea, not a syntactical one. Out of all of the purple-patch arguments against metaphors at the time, Parker’s bedchamber argument might be the most elaborate of all, but his metaphors are nonetheless obstinately plain. They are non-occult. Henry More also disavows radical forms of mysticism and occultism (i.e., “radical” from the standpoint of moderate Anglicanism), including the inspired rhetoric of Puritan preaching, the pantheistic currents of Ranter philosophy, and, most importantly for the present argument, the magical rhetoric of Rosicrucian philosophy—as exemplified by Thomas Vaughan. Before Vaughan translated the Fama and Confessio, he was already immersed in a heated argument with More, who identified his occult temperament as superstitious.33 By all accounts, Vaughan was a sorcerer following in the tradition of Agrippa and Dee, wholeheartedly practicing ceremonial language magic. Vaughan replied to More’s charges of superstition in what has come to be known as the More-Vaughan controversy, a 32. Ibid., 73. 33. More, Observations upon anthroposophia theomagica; Conjectura cabbalistica (London, 1653). On the More-Vaughan controversy, see Frederic Burnham, “The MoreVaughan Controversy: The Revolt against Philosophical Enthusiasm,” Journal of the History of Ideas 35 (1974): 33–49.

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lively dispute between two esoterically minded philosophers who called themselves natural philosophers. The caveat is that Vaughan’s work proves far more occult in temperament than More’s. The difference between the two is, in fact, categorical, and—importantly from the standpoint of the rhetorical tradition—the difference involves discordant philosophies of style. More points to Vaughan’s magical rhetoric as evidence of demonic delusion, rather than Rosicrucian enlightenment, characterizing Vaughan’s writings as “muddy and imaginary,” driven by the “use of dry metaphor[s],” and packed full of “phantasticall aenigmatic” expressions.34 At the apex of his argument, More dismisses the whole enterprise of Rosicrucian spell casting, sounding exactly like a new scientist in the mode of Bacon and Descartes: “Bidding a dieu to Reason, as having got some principle above it,” More complains, “Vaughan” and other Rosicrucian magicians “treat the casuall figurations of their anxious phansie” as if they were “revelations,” when in actuality they are “flarings of false light.”35 Using the metaphor of false light, More charges the magicians with rhetorical delusion, or worse yet rhetorical demonry, a form of communication that mimics the divine light of revelation and reason, all the while undercutting it. At the same time, More is prone to mystical reveries that are hard to distinguish from Jacob Boehme’s flights of fancy. As Lotte Mulligan notes, More expresses several of his quasi-empirical theories in the “trancelike terms” of an ecstatic mystic.36 And Vaughan is quick to note this fact, referring to the Anglican experimentalist as a “spirituall Ague.”37 To More’s credit, he acknowledges his own mystical exuberance, but he also forcefully defends it: “I am no more to be esteemed an Enthusiast ..... than those wise and circumspect philosophers Plato and Plotinus, who upon the more than ordinary sensible visits of the divine Love and Beauty ..... professed themselves no lesse moved.”38 While More admits to his own interest in 34. More, Observations, 14, 26, 53. 35. Ibid., 68. 36. Lotte Mulligan, “Reason, Right Reason, and Revelation in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England,” in Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, ed. Vickers, 387. 37. Vaughan, The Second Lash (London, 1651), 9. 38. More, Antidote against Atheisme (London, 1653), Preface.

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the sublime, he does not admit to magic. For More, the Spirit plays a role in philosophical inquiry, but the Spirit in no way contradicts the rationalism that he also invokes through Plato and Plotinus. Most importantly for philosophers of rhetoric, More expresses a non-occult idea about how his tropes operate, though it may not seem that way at first. More discloses that on occasion he has “thought fit” to “shadow out” in “a dark Parable” the metaphor that “Man” is “a Microcosm of a Little World”—so that humanity “will be figuratively understood.”39 New philosophers had thoroughly demolished the ontological version of the microcosm and macrocosm trope, which was at the heart of occult philosophy, astrology, and alchemy. The fact that More mentions the analogy in a seemingly positive way puts him in a problematic light, but of vital consequence to the More-Vaughan controversy, More adds a key qualification. His experimentation with the metaphor leads only to a figurative understanding of humanity, as he puts it, not a magicalrhetorical understanding in the way that Renaissance magicians understood the world, or in the way that Thomas Browne understood it. Browne finds “real truth” in the macrocosm to microcosm analogy, not a mere “trope of Rhetorick.”40 More finds only “figurative” truth in the analogy. He distinguishes between a magical and a skeptical attitude toward metaphors, favoring the latter at the expense of the former. Put differently, he rejects the occult framework supporting Vaughan’s Rosicrucianism, where tropes function as charmed objects in the hands of practiced sorcerers. By More’s empirical standards, there is no such thing as an organic magical language, but there is most assuredly such a thing as witchcraft. As More explains elsewhere, “one may charm” all day, but unless helpt by “a confederacy of Spirits,” such charming proves inefficacious.41 If Vaughan’s Rosicrucian magic worked—and More probably believed that it did—then it worked not because of how Rosicrucian sorcerers controlled natural mechanisms, but rather because of how they invoked preternatural spirits. By most modern 39. More, Conjectura cabbalistica, 53. 40. Browne, Religio Medici, 64. 41. More, “Letter to Mr. J[oseph] G[lanvill],” in Sadducismus triumphatus, 33.

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philosophical standards, the Rosicrucian magicians wittingly or unwittingly practiced witchcraft.

The Distinction between Natural Magic and Witchcraft Considered potentially effective by almost every new scientist, spell casting was imagined to have achieved results through pacts with the Devil, not by manipulating prelapsarian words inscribed in nature, and neither by creating mystical-sympathetic vibrations in the air, to cite two of the numerous examples of how thinkers at the time believed magical language operated.42 When magicians described their own charmed rhetoric as successful, the new philosophers of the Royal Society were not inclined to discard their comments as spurious. Rather, scientists accepted many of them as true, assuming that one important qualifier arrived with the acceptance. Demons colluded with magicians. New philosophers did not believe in natural magic, but they certainly believed in witchcraft.43 The dispute between magicians and new philosophers was not a dispute about belief in the existence of authentic charming, nor was it a dispute about the efficacy of witchcraft (or the power of edifying mystical supplications), because both sides accepted the reality of demonic spell casting or, in the opposite direction, efficacious prayer. The question involved how incantation worked when it did work. Advancers of learning repudiated the natural magician’s explanation, but they wholeheartedly accepted preternatural and supernatural explanations, the reality of diabolical sorcery, for example, or the reality of supernatural illumination. Contrarily, 42. Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing, 198. 43. Brian Vickers contends that new scientists dissociated themselves from magicians on the level of philology by rejecting the idea that sorcerers were able “to conjure angels or control material forces” with magical numbers and tropes (“Introduction,” Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, 5). Vickers rightly emphasizes that occult philosophers and new scientists treated language in “wholly opposed ways,” and so the general spirit of the argument is correct (5). Most new philosophers, however, accepted that certain magicians were capable of controlling material forces through verbal and written spells—with the help of demons. This complicates matters. Vickers mischaracterizes the seventeenth-century scientific attitude toward charmed rhetoric, as does William Covino (“Magic and/as Rhetoric: Outlines of a History of Phantasy,” Journal of Advanced Composition 12 [1992]: 349–58). Most new scientists believed in rhetorical enchantment, provided that a preternatural explanation accompanied the episode in question.

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Rosicrucians and other defenders of occult rhetoric insisted upon the naturalness of their magic, all in an effort to maintain a strict distinction between natural magic and preternatural magic (e.g., using emblems to manipulate organic energy, as opposed to using emblems to conjure demons). As a result, Rosicrucian magicians imagined themselves as participants only in natural science, while new philosophers imagined the Rosicrucians as participants in demonic science. Rosicrucians held that practiced sorcerers were capable of tapping into the inherent magic of words, tropes, and sounds. Moreover, they believed that magical rhetoric was subject to good or evil uses, depending upon the disposition of the orator’s heart. The magically inclined Webster, for example, insists upon this point: “that which [new scientists] call diabolical [magic]” is only diabolical “in the end and use.”44 For Webster, natural magic is inherently neither good nor evil. It is a matter of use, not nature. Ashmole makes a similar argument. A founding member of the Royal Society, an antiquarian, and a lifelong hermetic philosopher, Ashmole departs from the mainstream negative view of Rosicrucianism accepted by most of the members. Defending the “True Magician,” he writes, “It is not less absurd, then strange, to see how some Men ..... will not forebeare to ranke True Magicians with Conjurors, Necromancers, and Witches ..... who insolently intrude themselves into Magick ..... and (being in League with the Devill) make use of his assistance in their workes.”45 Real magicians are for Ashmole not to be confused with “Conjurors” and “Witches,” and the application of magical words does not necessarily indicate a preternatural pact with the Devil. While many other writers amplified the modern empirical position against natural magic, a small group of quasi-experimental philosophers maintained this strong distinction between natural language magic and demonic rhetoric. John Gaule, for example, advises that the charms of magicians and the spells of witches are differ44. John Webster, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (London, 1677), 152. 45. Elias Ashmole, Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (1652), ed. A. G. Debus (New York: Johnson Reprint Company, 1967), 443.

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ent in kind. He defines the magician as “one onely speculative upon the abstruse Miracles of Nature,” and as one who, after “searching into her occult Qualities, her hidden powers, her secret virtues, her Sympathies and Antipathies ..... urges nature so artificially, that he makes her to conclude and assent to work wonders.”46 “Happily thus far,” Gaule adds, the magicians “proceed both with true Science and good conscience.”47 For Gaule, such sorcerers work wonders as a result of manipulating occult qualities, not by conjuring devils to perform marvelous feats. In this way, Gaule connects the practice of the late Renaissance sorcerer to that of the experimental scientist, a thesis that Lynn Thorndike and Frances Yates successfully revive in the twentieth century. In his Doctrine of Devils, Thomas Ady arrives at a similar conclusion: “A Magus is properly a great Naturalist, or a person well skilled in the Courses and Operations of Nature.”48 For Ady, the magician is an experimental scientist, nothing more and nothing less. Contrarily, the witch is something diabolical in Ady’s taxonomy, either a cunning person, or—more commonly—a person who bargains with the Devil. From the standpoint of the new scientists, however, these positive ideas about natural magic prove problematic at best. At worst, such ideas function as evidence of a demonic ruse, where the so-called natural sorcerers and those who defend them (e.g., Gaule and Ady) suffer from wicked delusions. Occult philosophers maintained a categorical distinction between magic and witchcraft, while new philosophers lumped all magicians and witches together into one grouping, erasing the distinction entirely. To the advancers of learning, the difference between the enchanted language of John Dee and the enchanted language of the witches at Lancashire was peripheral, if extant at all. Occult philosophy and witchcraft were indistinguishable on a fundamental level, because both practices depended upon intelligent spirits, by modern scientific standards. And when the distinction between natural magic and witchcraft collapsed in scientific circles, claims 46. John Gaule, Select Cases of Conscience Touching Witches and Witchcraft (London, 1646), 33–34. 47. Ibid., 34. 48. Thomas Ady, Doctrine of Devils (London, 1676), 160.

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of magical rhetoric were taken only as evidence of nefarious preternaturalism—nefarious because magical-rhetorical procedures departed from traditional religious paradigms. Locke, for instance, illustrates this distinction superbly. For him, words are conventional in nature, and never magical: “Words ..... come to be made use of by Men, as the signs of their Ideas; not by any natural connexion that there is between particular articulate sounds and certain Ideas.”49 But unlike Hobbes and other skeptics, Locke acknowledges that the Devil sometimes works through language to subvert human faith: “The Prince of Darkness” beguiles unsuspecting audiences by using wicked tropes to create snares.50 While words are arbitrary objects, they can also persuade in a preternatural manner, Locke suggests, provided that orators allow demons into the rhetorical circumstances. Like most other theologically minded scientists associated with the Royal Society, Locke acknowledges the reality of witchcraft, all the while distancing himself from natural magic. Foreshadowing Locke, More—as already noted—makes the same case laconically: “One may charm long enough, even till his Heart ake, e’re he make one Serpent assemble near him, unles helpt by this confederacy of Spirits that drive them to the Charmer.”51 In other words, natural magic does not work, but witchcraft does. The experimental chemist Jean Van Helmont also shares this sentiment, identifying Renaissance magic as a demonic practice at heart. Criticizing the “magician[’s]” dependence upon the microcosm to macrocosm analogy, Van Helmont explains, “The name therefore of Microcosm or little world is Poetical, Heathenish, and metaphorical, but not natural, or true.”52 The term “heathenish,” in particular, brings demonry to mind, and it fortifies Van Helmont’s 49. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 405. Hobbes makes a similar point: “That names have been imposed on single things according to the nature of those things—is childish. For who could have it so when the nature of things is everywhere the same while languages are diverse?” (De homine [London, 1657], 39). 50. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 703. 51. More, “Letter to Mr. J[oseph] G[lanvill],” 33. 52. Jean Van Helmont, Physic Refined (1619), trans. John Chandler (London, 1662), 323. On Van Helmont’s chemistry in the context of the scientific revolution, see William Newman and Lawrence Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

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impulse to lump together Christian magicians and pagan sorcerers. Later in the Physic Refined, Van Helmont clarifies the connection, from the standpoint of the new experimentalism: if effective, then spell casting signals “a league or contract betwixt the Devil and the Witch,” the “Devils client.”53 In the mode of modern science, Van Helmont accepts the efficacy of spell casting (i.e., some spells work), but he does not accept the natural magician’s explanation of it. Rather, he associates spell casting with witchcraft. Moreover, and most crucially for philosophers of rhetoric, Van Helmont is familiar with the rhetorical tradition, as indicated by his references to “hysteron proteron,” “hyperbole,” and “antonomasia,” or interpreting one name for another.54 He uses these concepts effectively in Physic Refined, demonstrating that his rejection of magical rhetoric is not a rejection of tropes as such, and neither is it a critique of the rhetorical tradition. The opposite is the case. Van Helmont positively applies rhetoric—by the precepts of experimental science. Rhetoric is not the problem, assuming that it is used properly, that is, nonmagically. Like other writers sympathetic to the new plain style, Van Helmont distances modern science only from the use of enchanted tropes, not from the rhetorical tradition. Most of the seventeenth-century Puritan writers on demonology understood magical rhetoric in the same way. In the Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft (1608), William Perkins exemplifies the position, suggesting “a charm is a spell or verse, consisting of strange words, used as a sign or a watchword to the devil, to cause him to work wonders.”55 If words have magical power, then they have such power because the orator has made a pact with Satan, not because the orator has discovered a magical vocabulary: “words” are only “sounds framed by the tongue, or the breath that commeth from the lungs. And that which is onely a bare sound, in all reason, can have no virtue in it to cause a reall worke.”56 Other notable writers on witchcraft in England followed suit. 53. Van Helmont, Physic Refined, 570. 54. Ibid., 222, 169, 665. 55. Perkins, Discourse on the Damned Art of Witchcraft, 130. 56. Ibid., 130–34.

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They wholeheartedly accepted the existence of witchcraft, but they rejected the possibility of natural magical language. James Mason makes the point straightforwardly in his popular Anatomie of Sorcerie: “Words ..... themselves doe but only signifie; neither can characters doe or effect any thing, but only represent.”57 Words represent reality, but words do not produce reality. Alexander Roberts agrees: “Words have no vertue, but either to signifie and express the conceits of the minde, or to effect the eares of the Auditors, so that they can work nothing but in these two respects.”58 According to these mainstream philosophers of witchcraft, if enchanted language works wonders, then it does so by the intervention of spirits. This attitude connecting magical rhetoric with either supernatural or preternatural force—as opposed to natural force—has deep roots in Augustine and Aquinas. In the second book of On Christian Doctrine, Augustine argues that either a pact with the Devil or a relationship with God is at the heart of enchanted rhetoric. In the case of most magical conceptions of language, Augustine identifies the former as the source of efficacy. After listing a variety of charmed linguistic behaviors, including spell castings and occult invocations, Augustine explains that most esoteric rhetorical practices occur due to the “pestiferous association of men and demons.”59 He adds that such rhetorical behaviors are “to be classed with those which result from certain pacts and contracts with demons.”60 That is, in most cases of spell casting, the Devil intervenes. Commenting upon occult supplications, Aquinas arrives at a similar conclusion, suggesting that magical philology of the pagan sort addresses the Devil himself. It is the Devil’s response (allowed by God) that gives magic its efficacy, not the inherent power of language, and certainly not the occult power of the imagination: Wherefore [magic] does not make use of [words] as causes, but as signs; not however as signs instituted by God, as are the sacramental signs. It follows, therefore, that they are empty signs, and consequently a kind of agreement 57. James Mason, Anatomie of Sorcerie (London, 1612), 22. 58. Alexander Roberts, A Treatise on Witchcraft (London, 1616), 69. 59. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 58–59. 60. Ibid., 59.

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or covenant made with the demons for the purpose of consultation and of compact by tokens.61

Marsilio Ficino, Cornelius Agrippa, and other Renaissance magicians take Augustine and Aquinas to heart on this matter, which is why they insist upon the natural foundation of their ceremonial language magic, different in kind from the demonic rhetorical effects made possible by pacts with Satan. The seventeenth-century experimentalists’ reaction against magic challenges the thesis that English science grew out of the Rosicrucians’ occult philosophy of language, or out of any type of magical philosophy of language. It grew against it. Yates, however, like D. P. Walker and Thorndike before her, is absolutely right to put occultism at the center of seventeenth-century intellectual reforms. This includes the rhetorical reforms. Yates deserves even more credit than she gets in the history of rhetoric for appreciating how significant a role occult philosophy played in the Royal Society’s language reforms, even if that role was one of strong antagonist, a point with which Yates never properly contends. The most popular view of Yates at present is that she exaggerated the Rosicrucian influence, and—more broadly—that she exaggerated the presence of occult philosophy in the debates of the era. Reacting to Yates’s book on the Rosicrucians, Charles Webster, for example, establishes this pattern of criticism by dismissing the Rosicrucian influence. He perceives “Rosicrucianism ..... as a peripheral and extreme expression” of occultism that “never appealed to more than a small group of devotees of the esoteric.”62 Webster’s point is that Rosicrucianism had little or no influence upon the philosophical debates of the Interregnum. Like most of Yates’s critics, Webster underestimates the number of Rosicrucian magicians operating in England, especially if we count the horde of astrologers who had an interest in Rosicrucian teaching. And even if we grant to Webster that there were not large groups 61. Aquinas, Summa theologica, II: 96:1. See also I: 110:4. 62. Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform 1626–1660 (London: Duckworth, 1975), 516. Vickers also suggests that Yates discovered the occult everywhere, which is to say that he perceives hyperbole in her arguments (“Introduction,” Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, 1–56).

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of Rosicrucians working in seventeenth-century England, the real question involves the Rosicrucian influence upon the reforms of the period. The influence, rather than the number of practitioners, is most important, and Rosicrucian rhetoric loomed large in the minds of the Royal Society’s key members, as is clearly evidenced by Glanvill’s, Wilkins’s, Parker’s, and Ward’s biting counterstatements against it. These philosophers protested vehemently, and we ought to take their vim and vigor as a signal. They perceived Rosicrucian philosophy as a substantial threat to modern experimentalism, and, more specifically, they perceived magical rhetoric as a serious threat to the new plain style. The Royal Society’s authoritative figures expressed fervent anti-Rosicrucian sentiments, and this is enough to make Rosicrucianism something other than a peripheral issue during the middle and later decades of the seventeenth century.

Astrology, Magic, and the New Plain Style Many astrologers attempted to defend their natural art against the implication of demonic rhetoric and divination. In Englands Propheticall Merline (1644), William Lilly argues, “All the Antagonists I meet mistake the ground of [the astrologer’s] Art” with “the darke Sentences of Oracles,” adding that “they yoke [astrologers] with Sorcerers, Necromancers, [and] Magitians” and call them “figure flingers” and “Stargazers.”63 In response to these charges, Lilly asks, “What have we to do with Oracles? Do we raise the dead ..... do we invocate Spirits? Or consult with them? Do we use more than nature?”64 Lilly’s contrast between astrology and magic is complex, especially his argument that astrologers are not sorcerers, despite the fact that Merlin appears in the title of the book. Merlin is one of the most famous sorcerers in all of English history. Lilly’s acceptance of Merlin and denial of magic might appear blatantly contradictory to some modern readers, but from Lilly’s own standpoint, the exact opposite is true. He figures Merlin as a precursor to those Renaissance occult philosophers who profess to use only natural magic, not preternatural magic. In other words, Lilly argues for 63. William Lilly, Englands Propheticall Merline (London, 1644), B. 64. Ibid.

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the viability of natural magic as an aspect of the astrological worldview, all the while distancing responsible astrologers from demonic oracles. The concept governing Lilly’s argument is that genuine magicians achieve power by manipulating organic elements in the cosmos, rather than by making a “pestiferous association” with demons, to recall Augustine’s phrase. For Lilly, legitimate astrologers do not “use more than nature,” and so if they are magicians, they are merely natural magicians, not demonic fortune-tellers or other types of false prophets who have bargained with the Devil. Astrological divination is for Lilly something other than wicked fortune-telling (the Witch of Endor, shadowy chiromancers, and so forth). By Lilly’s account, most forms of magical rhetoric are manifestations of witchcraft, while astrology is much closer to the new experimentalism, because it is a form of natural prognostication. The Anglican Royalist John Gadbury makes a similar defense of astrology in The Nativity of the Late King Charls (1659). He writes that “many pretenders” are found “shrowding themselves under the branches [of astrology]; professing great skill in Conjuration, Necromancie, Theurgie, the Cristal, and what not, when not one in ten knows what a Nativity means.”65 Gadbury adds that if one were to “talk to them of their Genius, a Sigil, Lamen, Charm, Love-powder, &c. they are in their Element ..... but question with them concerning Art, or anything worthy” and one would receive no “true satisfaction.”66 Like Lilly, Gadbury distinguishes between the astrologer’s natural divinatory practices and the sorcerer’s preternatural practices, distancing himself from the demonic side of rhetoric and prophecy. Seventeenth-century astrologers, however, find themselves fighting a losing battle against scientists, despite their considerable efforts to differentiate between natural and preternatural fortune-telling. Most new philosophers had thoroughly demolished the distinction, seeing in the astrologer’s art a practice aided by demons. Lilly’s and Gadbury’s defenses of astrology as natural prophecy, therefore, simply did not register in the idiom of modern science. Consequently, 65. John Gadbury, The Nativity of the Late King Charls (London, 1659), Epistle to the Reader. 66. Ibid.

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writers like Ward, Wilkins, Sprat, and Glanvill lumped astrologers together with other types of diabolical orators, associating their astrological vocabularies with the less than plain styles of charmers and witches. By the precepts of learning’s advancement, astrologers were either demonic conjurors in disguise or superstitious sophists, bedazzling audiences and moving them falsely. In either case, they were not welcomed into the halls of the new experimentalism, though many charged the gate. That seventeenth-century astrology should be seen as any type of magic, however, comes into serious question in Ann Geneva’s Astrology and the Seventeenth-Century Mind: “Astrology in seventeenthcentury England was not a science. It was not a religion. It was not magic. Nor was it astronomy, mathematics, Puritanism, neo-Platonism, psychology, meteorology, alchemy, or witchcraft.”67 If not, then what was it? “Astrology,” Geneva continues, “used some of these [disciplines] as tools; it held tenets in common with others,” but ultimately it “was only itself: a unique and divinatory prognostic art embodying centuries of accredited methodology and tradition.”68 Geneva challenges contemporary scholars to think about what seventeenthcentury astrologers claimed to accomplish—that is, to forecast the future based upon planetary configurations, nativities, and the like, and to perform other systematic hermeneutical acts upon what many astrologers called “the speech of the stars,” a phrase that should interest historians of rhetoric. Astrologers were and are rhetorical readers of the cosmos: the issue of true or false rhetorical hermeneutics is a separate one. Geneva’s appreciation for the intricacies of astrology is well taken, but the argument that astrology is not magic contradicts her own subsequent explanation of how it functions. Geneva suggests moments later that seventeenth-century astrology “demonstrates” an “inextricable interconnection with the neo-Platonic world,” and so when the Neoplatonic world began to collapse in the circles of modern experimentalism, astrology also collapsed.69 On the one hand, she holds that the new philosophers were wrong to associ67. Ann Geneva, Astrology and the Seventeenth-Century Mind: William Lilly and the Language of the Stars (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 9. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid., 12–14.

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ate astrology with magic, which is how they ultimately dismissed astrology. On the other hand, she acknowledges that astrology depended upon the Neoplatonic cosmos, which was and is a magical cosmos at heart. Both cannot be true. Geneva is undoubtedly right to suggest that many philosophers oversimplified astrology as a way of disarming it, especially as a way of disarming Lilly and other nonconformist prognosticators who challenged the Royalist nature of Restoration science. When Sprat characterized astrology as a bric-a-brac collection of superstitious ideas, he underplayed its complexity.70 When Samuel Butler portrayed the astrologer Sidrophel as discovering a new star that, subsequently, turned out to be the tail of a boy’s kite, he also underplayed astrology’s complexity (Hudibras, II.iii. 414–422). The new philosophers, and those influenced by them, were nonetheless absolutely right to associate astrology with magic. The two systems of thought were interdependent in the late Renaissance, and to suggest otherwise is to transform seventeenth-century astrology into something non-occult and therefore anachronistic.

Conclusion: Words and Things, and Words as Things Members of the Royal Society distinguished between their approach to language and the magician’s approach, which, by the precepts of new philosophy, functioned as an example of either superstition or witchcraft. However, both attitudes toward rhetoric—the magical and the scientific—have been linked to correspondence theories of language and reality. This has produced much confusion in the history of rhetoric and has led in the first place to presumptions that the Royal Society’s view of language is somehow compatible with the magician’s view of language. But Renaissance magicians do not hold a correspondence view of language and reality, though it may seem that way on the surface. Their understanding of occult words and tropes goes much deeper than mere correspondence in our modern sense of the term. The idea of arranging magical words and phrases so as to create reality moves far beyond the dynamics of symbolic efficacy held by new philosophers. Magical rhetoric is too synthetic, vital, 70. Sprat, History of the Royal Society, 97, 364–65.

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and entelechial to lend itself to the charge of banal correspondence that ultimately leads to scholars carrying bags of objects rather than words themselves, as in Jonathan Swift’s parody of modern correspondence theories of language in book 3 of Gulliver’s Travels (1726): An Expedient was therefore offered, that since Words are only the Names for Things, it would be more convenient for men to carry about them such Things, as were necessary to express the particular Business they are to discourse on. [And] many of the most Learned and Wise adhere to the New Scheme of expressing themselves by Things, which hath only this Inconvenience attending it, that if a Man’s Business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be obliged in Proportion to carry a greater bundle of Things upon his Back....... I have often beheld two of those Sages almost sinking under the weight of their Packs, like Pedlars among us; who, when they met in the Streets, would lay down their Loads, open their Sacks, and hold Conversation for an Hour together.

Swift’s spoof could never be mistaken as a parody of magical philology. The passage requires for its good humor the dissociation of sensibility: language must be separable from the world of “Things.”71 Renaissance magicians, on the contrary, would see no purpose in carrying bags of objects, as in Swift’s satire, because they carried the magical reality of words. For them, words were enough: words were things. The main barrier keeping magical philology safe from the reductionistic models of modern correspondence involves philosophy of style. In magical philology, language itself is a part of the cosmic order, “a fabric interwoven” and inseparable, as Hanneway observes.72 Style is an organic part of content, and content is an organic part of style. And it is precisely this entelechial impulse in magical rhetoric—this occult philosophy of forma—that distinguishes it from any type of strict correspondence theory of language and existence, as we think of correspondence theories in the post-Cartesian and post71. On seventeenth-century universal language schemes, see M. M. Slaughter, Universal Languages and Scientific Taxonomy in the Seventeenth-Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 72. Hannaway, The Chemists and the Word, 107.

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Baconian worldviews. In order for language to correspond to an object, it must first be considered as separate from that object, and Renaissance magicians will not even concede this basic assumption of difference. There is no such thing as pure rhetoric apart from substance in magical philology. There is no such thing as language in need of attachment to reality, or reality in need of attachment to language. In the world of magical philology, language is by its very nature simultaneous with and indicative of reality. Language is a powerful mode of reality, not simply a way to talk about reality. W. B. Yeats comprehends this point in his Neoplatonic reverie “Among School Children,” where he asks a haunting question in verse form: Labour is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul. Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut-tree, great rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?               (VIII. ll. 57–64)

How can we know the language from the substance? The modern correspondence theory of truth arrives in the form of the scientific language programs, not in the form of magical philology. Emerging alongside the Cartesian path and the Port-Royal philosophy of transparency, a modern utilitarian view of language appears for the first time in English rhetoric. In the new English experimentalism, language becomes a mechanism used to discuss reality, a neutral, functional, plain object, not an occult device capable of transmogrifying reality. The mainstream philosophers of the Royal Society understand tropes as tools, while occult writers understand tropes as magical objects, at least potentially, in the hands of practiced sorcerers. When comparing and contrasting the magician’s rhetoric and the new philosopher’s rhetoric, we should always keep in mind that their accounts of language are different in kind. Their philosophies of style are incommensurable. 114   natural magic

Chapter 4

Demonic El oquence

)( Intellectuals in late Renaissance England were particularly devoted to the examination of witchcraft and other demonic practices. At no other time in the history of the West did the study of bewitchment play such a central role in mainstream thought, and this includes the rhetorical tradition. As already noted, the push for the new plain style was a push against various types of enchanted rhetoric, but demonic conceptions were by far the most typical. If we are to grasp the scope and gravity of the plain language reforms, we would be well served to understand how writers of the period figured this most emblematic antithesis of plainness: witchery.

Demonic Inversion The idea of witchcraft loomed large in the minds of seventeenth-century language reformers. That demonic eloquence existed was assumed by almost all of the new philosophers, and that it took particular forms was also assumed. The nature of those shapes varied according to the rhetorical circumstances at 115 

hand, unsurprisingly, but we can note a couple of key tropological elements that were almost always identified with it. In its most basic manifestation, witchcraft functions upon the principle of inversion. This brings to mind two primary kinds of tropes: antithesis (and variations upon it such as chiasmus and antimetabole) and irony (and variations upon it such as antiphrasis, liotes, hyperbole, and dissimulation). It was a matter of common sense to most seventeenth-century intellectuals that these tropes, when figured together, potentially signaled demonic activity. More than any other form of figuration, irony lends itself to demonry, because the ironist is so good at undercutting edifying structures and mocking the world. As John Smith rightly observes in the Mysterie of Rhetorique Unveil’d (1657), “irony” is “the mocking Trope,” which is well suited for derision and inversion.1 It is not irony alone, however, that concerned most theologians and rhetorical theorists in the period. Like every other trope, irony can be used for positive or negative purposes. Rather, it is a very specific kind of irony, what we should call perverse irony, which separates the rhetoric of good from that of evil. This brings to the forefront the second key trope involved in early modern conceptions of diabolical rhetoric: antithesis. The Devil’s language is antithetical to God’s language, to state the obvious. Or, as George Downame suggests, “The Devill will have a word for evill, for every word that God shall have for good.”2 The Devil uses antithetical rhetoric against every aspect of God’s creation, producing tainted eloquence that undercuts uplifting rhetorical practices, a point that King James illustrates in a rhetorically effective passage in the Daemonologie: “As God spake by his Oracles, spake [the Devil] not so by his? As GOD had as well bloudie Sacrifices, as others without bloud, had not he the like? As God has Churches sanctified to his service, with Alters, Priests Sacrifices, Ceremonies and Prayers; had he not the like polluted his service?”3 Antithesis alone, however, like irony alone, did not necessarily signal witchery. Philosophers were not wary of antithesis in and of 1. John Smith, The Mysterie of Rhetorique Unveil’d (London, 1657), 38. 2. George Downame, Apostolicall Injunction for Unity and Peace (London, 1639), 26. 3. James I, Daemonologie, 36.

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itself, as is evidenced by the fact that the trope governed a vast majority of writing in the late Renaissance. As Morris Croll observes, the language art of antitheta “in the seventeenth century ..... arrived at absolute perfection.”4 Rather, what worried many philosophers of rhetoric was the nefarious use of antithesis combined with irony. Wickedly applied, this combination most often marked the idiom of witchcraft and other related forms of demonic communication. Put differently and more generally, the Devil mimics God in language, but the Devil always has in mind a contrary purpose. Structurally, this demonic activity usually manifests itself in amalgamations of irony and antithesis, as seventeenth-century philosophers of rhetoric theorized the Devil’s eloquence. Satan appropriates and inverts healthy forms of rhetoric in profane ways and toward profane ends. The result is depravation and despair, though often carried out under the disguises of edification, exhilaration, and ecstasy. And indeed the witchcraft literature of the period is packed full of descriptions of such irony. Nicholas Remy, for instance, describes in great detail the “preposterous inversion[s]” of witches, using the midnight Sabbath as an apt illustration, where those possessed by the Devil dance, sing, and perform debased incantations: They love to do everything in a ridiculous and unseemly manner. For they turn their backs towards the demons when they go to worship them, and approach them sideways like a crab; when they hold out their hands in supplication they turn them downwards ..... and in other such ways they behave in a manner opposite to that of other men.5

Along similar lines, the French theologian Jean Boucher notices inversionary impulses in the rituals of witchcraft: “[Witches] make 4. Croll, Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm, 56. 5. Nicolas Remy, Demonolatry (1595), ed. Montague Summers, trans. E. A. Ashwin (London, 1930), 61. For an introduction to witchcraft in seventeenth-century England, see Clark, Thinking with Demons. See also Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1999); James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); Ian Bostridge, Witchcraft and Its Transformations, 1650– 1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Wallace Notestein, A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558–1718 (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1968).

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the sign of the cross with the left hand, instead of the right, say the Mass upside down and often naked, instead of clothed,” and “make banquets without bread or wine, in contempt of the sacramental species.”6 Remy and Boucher apprehend the tenets of demonic contrariety. Witches imitate sacred rituals. Through ironic reversals, however, they create not sacred rhetoric, but rather its perverse antitheses—hellish ceremony and reprehensible eloquence. Witchery is the repulsive opposite of edifying mystical rhetoric. Inheriting the continental tradition of demonology, the English writers on witchcraft reinforce the idea that demonic rhetoric imitates and yet ironically reverses sacred discourses. As James Mason warns in his popular Anatomie of Sorcerie (1612), Oftentimes [sorcerers] use good and godly words and characters: and therefore their doings [do not appear as] evill, nor wrought by Satan. But herein they do mightily betray their ignorance in the crafty policies of the divell: who ever (as neare as it is possible for him) will cover his wicked entents and dealings with the cloake of holinesse and honesty, turning himselfe, as the Apostle Saint Paul saith, into an angell of light. For even as the holy angels in heaven do indeede performe all duties, and use al good and godly meanes according to God his commandements, to the honour of God, and the good of his elect: even so Satan and his ministers, the sorcerers, will seeme to doe the same: albeit they have alwaies another, yea a contrary entent and meaning.7

Thomas Heywood and John Gaule make similar arguments. In The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells (1634), Heywood notes that “the Divell doth th’ Almightly zany. For in those great works which all wonder aske, he is still present with his Anti-maske.”8 Gaule describes the Devil as “one that faines to imitate [God] though in contrary wayes.”9 Demons, he adds in a rhetorical flourish, have “the 6. Jean Boucher, Couronne mystique ou armes de piete (Tournai, 1623), quoted in Clark, Thinking with Demons, 15. On the structure of the witches’ Sabbath, see Gustav Henningsen, “An Archaic Pattern of the Witches’ Sabbath,” in Early Modern European Witchcraft, ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 191–219. 7. Mason, Anatomie of Sorcerie (London, 1612), 59. 8. Thomas Heywood, The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells (London, 1634), 415. 9. Gaule, Select Cases of Conscience, 68–69.

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most malicious and immediate aversion from the greatest Good; and the most malicious and immediate conversion to the greatest Evil.”10 Gaule uses antithesis to bolster the point. Form participates in content, revealing the imitative yet contrary pattern of witchery, where the intent is to convert goodness into evil. Representations of the demonic in Renaissance literature superbly illustrate this dynamic of wicked inversion. For example, combinations of antithesis and irony are the dominant tropes in all of Shakespeare’s portrayals of demonry. Shakespeare’s villains and tragic heroes inevitably suffer from some type of demonic irony. King Lear mimics the good king, but reverses this rectitude through acts of perverted charisma. Falstaff imitates the trusted friend, but also inverts friendship by becoming the bad influence. Lady Macbeth mimics the good wife, but simultaneously undercuts the positive archetype by encouraging Macbeth’s road to ruin. She plays the role of the succubus. The list continues. Even the best of Shakespeare’s heroes are endangered by demonic inversion. Hamlet’s quasi-Oedipal impulse lurks in the subtext of his effort to displace his conniving uncle. What Freudian critics of Shakespeare fail to explain convincingly, however, the Renaissance demonologists clearly comprehend. Active evil operates as the force behind such topsyturvy impulses, not the capricious energy of the unconscious mind. Other writers of literature at the time were equally aware of the metaphysical tension created by displays of demonic irony. Ben Jonson explores the topic marvelously in his Masque of the Queens (1609), where he rightly builds the dance of the witches around strict notions of topsy-turvydom. He provides useful stage notes for how the witches should perform reversals of sacred ceremony. Their dance should be “full of preposterous change, and gesticulation,” he insists, and they should “do all things contrary to the custom of Men, dancing back to back, hip to hip, their hands joined, and making their circles backward, to the left hand, with strange phantastique motions in their heades, and bodyes.”11 Jonson explains how 10. Ibid., 18–19. 11. Ben Jonson, Works, ed. C. H. Herford and P. and E. Simpson (11 vols.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), vol. 7, 344–50.

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a dance inspired by the Devil functions tropologically. He does not foreground antithesis alone, strictly speaking. Rather, he points to a combination of antithesis and irony, which requires a precise form of imitation that serves to intensify the ironic contrast. The dance of the witches is still a dance, not simply a random commotion, but one organized around the precepts of despair, or, in false consciousness, happiness. That is, the witches experience their own despair as happiness, which is a particularly insidious form of despair. Later in the century, Thomas Shadwell, in The Lancashire Witches (1682), rehearses these same tropes of contrariety and dissimulation in his witch characters, all of whom perform upside-down ceremonies, dancing “with fantastic unusual postures” and advocating perverted versions of life.12 This includes a perverted sense of cooking, with which Shadwell seems especially preoccupied. His witches describe in extravagant detail and in charming lyrics the various vile ingredients in their caldrons, subversive recipes that require all the care of preparing a nourishing meal, or a healing remedy, but always to a contrary purpose—the corruption of love and health. The obvious rhetorical analogue to the witches’ brew is demonic sophistry, a form of eloquence that often appears inspiring (i.e., nourishing to the spirit), but in the end only poisons the imaginations of those who partake in it. And when the Devil makes an appearance in Shadwell’s drama, he—aptly by the precepts of topsy-turvydom— promises to the witches not the power to create, for he cannot “create” in the true sense of the word, but rather he promises the power to subvert what is natural in God’s creation: Thy Charms shall make the Moon and Stars come down, And in thick darkness, hide the Sun at Noon. Winds thou shalt raise, and straight their rage control. The Orbs upon their Axes shall not rowl; ..... At thy command Woods from their seats shall rove, Stones from their Quarries, and fixt Oaks remove. 12. Shadwell, The Lancashire Witches (London, 1682), 43.

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Vast standing lakes shall flow, and, at thy will, The most impetuous Torrents shall stand still: Swift Rivers shall (while wond’ring Banks admire) Back to their Springs, with violent hast, retire.                           (43)

In portraying demonic rhetoric, Shadwell, like Jonson, turns to the familiar combination of antithesis and irony, exposing in the practice of witchery a recognizable form of inversion, where sweet seems bitter and bitter seems sweet. The most striking literary exploration of the demonic in this period, however, belongs to Milton, whose Pandemonium is organized around numerous combinations of antithesis and irony. Milton portrays a type of disordered order that was the hallmark of demonic inversion throughout the Renaissance, where hopelessness counts as hope, where rhetorical frigidity counts as rhetorical fire, and where the lowest of the low, Satan himself, sits at the center of the anti-palace.13 And from the start, Satan appears as a grandiloquent figure, void of any real concern for others and incapable of engaging in genuine conversation. His eloquence is best suited for selfimportant courtly displays, not for enlivening transfers of pathos. Longinus has a word for this sort of overstuffed rhetoric: psychrotita (ψυχρότητα), which often translates as “failed sublimity” or “false wit.” The word literally means “frigidity,” and in Greek rhetoric it connotes the cold conveyances of grandiose speakers.14 The Devil represents the apex of grandiosity in Paradise Lost, and so Milton rightly creates for Satan the most deadening type of eloquence imaginable, unable to produce warmth, and instead designed to evacuate life itself from the audience. Satan’s rhetoric, like all demonic rhetoric, leaves us chilly in the end, though it is often disguised as fiery 13. On Milton’s study of demonic rhetoric, see Ryan J. Stark, “Cold Styles: On Milton’s Critiques of Frigid Rhetoric in Paradise Lost,” Milton Quarterly 37 (2003): 21–30. 14. James Arieti and John Crossett translate psychrotita as “false wit,” but they clarify the term in their annotations upon On the Sublime, ed. and trans. Arieti and Crossett (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1985): “Literally, the word means ‘coldness,’ and is applied to snow, air, and dead things; by extension it is applied to a cold-hearted person, and then to one who is flat, lifeless, insipid” (25).

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and inspirational. Frigidity pervades Satanic communication in Paradise Lost, which explains in a forgotten sense why the center of hell is frozen in Milton’s epic, and in Dante’s epic, for that matter. Hell’s coldness is rhetorical. While discussing demonology in seventeenth-century England, Stuart Clark brings sharply into focus the antithetical and ironic nature of demonic rhetoric. He concentrates especially upon the idea of the “witch’s Sabbath,” an “inversionary ritual” organized around patterns of antithesis and dissimulation.15 Such rituals mimic sacred ceremony, Clark explains, but they do so in a way that proves “extravagant and excessive,” and therefore unmistakably demonic, at least to attentive Christian audiences, who perceive in “the manner of utterance” that something is “wrong.”16 In other words, witches imitate the patterns of sacred rhetoric, but they also act in a way that is ultimately antithetical to the good, thus producing demonic irony. As a result, they create a kind of disordered order, or contrary order. In Examen of Witches (1590), Henri Boguet describes this type of disordered order as “cacarchy,” an usual word that denotes inverted order, rather than anarchy itself.17 Pure anarchy, in fact, ruins the demonic inversion. Anarchy leads to something other than unadulterated diabolical rhetoric. Discord may raise a mutiny, but discord cannot conduct a march, in Samuel Johnson’s phrasing, and the Devil desires to march against God. That is, discord is not the telos of demonic rhetoric; rather, disordered order is, a point that Aquinas argues with clarity in Summa theologica, where he talks about the Devil’s desire to mimic and simultaneously invert Godly order.18 Hell has an upside-downness (not an impulse toward anarchy), where the greatest vices are counted as the greatest virtues. Perhaps to the untutored eye, however, demonic ceremonies appear sacred, at least for a moment. Moreover, if taken alone, the purely structural characteristics of such ceremonies offer little insight into the overall meaning of the particular rhetorical utterance or ritual at issue. A purely syntactical approach to demonic discourse provides 15. Clark, Thinking with Demons, 82. 16. Ibid., 82. 17. Henri Boguet, Examen of Witches (Lyon, 1590; London: Rodker, 1929), 14–15. 18. Aquinas, Summa theologica, II:12:1.

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little help in distinguishing between diabolical and edifying rhetoric. The reader of irony and antithesis also requires a sense of the utterance’s overall piety, a gestalt-like apprehension of the Weltanschauung in which the particular rhetorical event functions. This apprehension includes most importantly the motive and purpose of the discourse at issue. For the careful religious reader, an ontological sense of a ceremony’s aura proves key, because it provides an unmistakable clue that something is terribly wrong in the case of demonic rhetoric. In addition to a tropological sensitivity, philosophers of rhetoric must have a spiritual sensitivity, in other words, which allows for discernment in distinguishing between evil and uplifting eloquence.

White Witchcraft Demonic inversions of order did not always arrive in the overtly fiendish ceremonies of Satanists. Witchcraft writers of the day emphasize this point. In addition to constant warnings about the inversions of nefarious witches, demonologists show an equal concern for the ironies and antitheses of so-called white witches. For many writers, the benevolent witch was just as dangerous as the demonic witch, if not more dangerous, because his or her inversions were often more subtle. Echoing Deuteronomy 18:10–11, Perkins, for example, describes the good witch as an instrument “by which [the Devil] taketh and destroyeth the souls of men,” often and disturbingly with the “consent” of those people who seek them out, because they do not appreciate that the good witch is also an “enemie to Gods name, worship, and glorie.”19 Richard Bernard also argues that white witches “nourish devilish and uncharitable conceits in those that seeke unto them,” noting as well that “Augustine” and other theologians condemned “these Wizards.”20 In A Treatise Against Witchcraft (1590), Henry Holland forwards the same point in a vivid metaphor: those who use good witches “seeke help of the same serpent that stung them.”21 Providing the logic behind these condemnations of white witch19. Perkins, Discourse on the Damned Art of Witchcraft, 255, 178. 20. Richard Barnard, Guide to Grand-Jury Men (London, 1627), 143–44. 21. Henry Holland, A Treatise against Witchcraft (Cambridge, 1590), F4v.

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ery, Gaule distinguishes between “explicit” and “implicit” forms of “Covenanting [with the] Devil.”22 An invisible covenant with the Devil occurs when people desire “either a persuasion, or at least an expectation” of some sort through seemingly benevolent sorcerers, which “is a faith or assent of the same nature that the Witch now works by.”23 Put differently, the benevolent witch lures victims into forming implicit covenants with the Devil, which lead to the same bad end as explicit covenants (e.g., the contract between Faustus and Mephistopheles). White witches, like demonic sorcerers, destroy those who ask for their help, but they do so while giving the impression of friendship, in what amounts to nefarious episodes of irony and antithesis. Additionally, Gaule’s use of the term “persuasion” is important in this context, because it reinforces the unmistakable connection between sorcery and rhetoric in the witchcraft literature of the age. The white witch performs rhetorical persuasions. The witch, among other things, is an expert orator, and wicked spell casting fits squarely within the diabolical side of the rhetorical tradition, a point that the witchcraft writers of the day find uncontroversial, and even completely obvious—not worth mentioning in most cases. Exactly how people should distinguish between the rhetoric of the white witch and that of the legitimate priest or minister is another topic of much discussion at this time. Antitheses between the Church’s established traditions and the witch’s unconventional traditions usually figure prominently in the conversation. Andreas Gerhard, for example, provides a commonplace list of “devises” of the “Devill” and of white witches. These include the “mumbling of prophane prayers, consisting of words both strange and senseless,” various “rytes and ceremonies unknown to the Church of God,” and other esoteric practices such as “fortunetellings, oracles, soothsayinges,” and “enchauntmentes.”24 Mason suggests similarly that white witches “arrogate ..... unto themselves that which is proper unto 22. Gaule, Select Cases of Conscience, 31. 23. Ibid., 72–74. 24. Andreas Gerhard, The True Tryall and Examination, trans. Thomas Newton (London, 1586), 34–35.

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God,” all the while posing as pious aides to the Christian Church, rather than rivals.25 Like most witchcraft writers, Gerhard and Mason conceptualize the so-called good witch as functioning outside of ordinary Church practices in order to solve the problems of clients, which is the clearest signal that some form of disguised demonry is at work. To the shrewd reader of witchery armed with proper rhetorical training, such behaviors indicate demonic inversion, despite the sorcerer’s frequent claims of divine guidance. Indeed, it is the assertion of divine guidance in the absence of orthodox Christian doctrines that most concerns the philosophers of the age. The benevolent witch undercuts the Church’s authority through reversals, inversions, and the like, all the while claiming to be of God. This is why witchcraft critics felt compelled to spend considerable time warning society about the white witches’ implicit covenants with the Devil. Moreover, such warnings were based upon the diagnosis of demonic antithesis and irony, placing the capacity for rhetorical understanding at the very center of the discussions about benevolent witchcraft, just as the famous passage from Isaiah illustrates, both in content and figuration: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter” (Is 5:20). The ability to read differences between edifying and nefarious tropes serves a metaphysical purpose: to distinguish between the kingdom of Christ and the kingdom of Antichrist, and to struggle for Christ. This includes a rhetorical struggle. That is, Christians must put upon themselves the idiom of righteousness, which is not a mere rhetorical style, ornament, or façade (the commonplace modern understanding of style), but rather is a form and a momentum born out of the shaping of a Christian life, a lifestyle. Christop Vischer also sets the inversionary rhetoric of the white witch in its proper rhetorical figuration. A German witchcraft writer who influenced William Perkins and other English demonologists, Vischer activates the central rhetorical architectonic of the age, comparison and contrast through successions of antitheses. Spe25. Mason, Anatomie of Sorcerie, 3.

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cifically, Vischer seeks to distinguish between the virtuous minister and the white witch: “Contrary to and against this our solemnly sworn baptismal vow are the actions of the damned blessers [who have gone from being the] princes of heaven, to the latchbolts and flaming fires of hell, from being blessed, cursed, from being friends of God, enemies of God,” and from “priests of the living God, to shameful ministers of the accursed devil.”26 Like many other philosophers of demonology, Vischer simultaneously explains and enacts the inversionary tropology of demonry. The demonic priest both mimics and undercuts the edifying behaviors of the Christian priest. Those given over to the Devil suffer from and perpetuate striking inversions, as illustrated precisely by Vischer’s characterization: “damned blessers.” This is a particularly helpful phrase, because it signals the reversal of sacred rhetoric—blessing in reverse— which should not be mistaken as a straightforward type of cursing. Rather, blessing in reverse operates through a combination of antithesis and irony. Such rhetoric simultaneously imitates and undercuts the sacred, which makes it a form of cacarchy. It is not chaotic rhetoric, strictly speaking, but rather it is eloquence governed by the architectonic of diabolical contrariety. Perkins makes the same observation about the ability of seemingly benevolent witches to disguise themselves as practitioners of proper religion. Of particular interest to philosophers of rhetoric and religion, Perkins accuses the Catholic priest of being the most common type of white witch, describing mystical relics as “Satanical impostures,” Catholic exorcisms as “meere inchantments,” and 26. Christoph Vischer, Einfelltiger . . . . . Bericht wider den . . . . . Segen (Schmalkalden, 1571), quoted and translated by Clark, Thinking with Demons, 99. This pattern of antitheses in quick succession governs Lucas Cranach and Philipp Melanchthon’s Passional Christi und Antichristi (Wittenberg, 1521), and it also appears in many apocalyptic texts of the English Renaissance. See, for example, The Hurt of Sedicion (1549), where John Cheke argues that those who confuse truth with its “contrarie” encourage a world of demonic inversions: “for right wronge, for vertue vice, for lawe will, for love hatred,...... for true worshippe detestable idolatrie: and to be shorte, for God Sathan, for Christ Antichrist” (1003). In the very tropology of the sentence, Cheke enacts the Renaissance eschatological mentality, where God confronts Satan at the end of the period, both linguistically and historically. Thomas Wilson accomplishes a similar sequence in his apocalyptic Arte of Rhetorique: “many men now a daies” for “Chastitie, take Lecherie: for truth, like falshood: for gentlenesse, seek crueltie: for Justice, use wrong dealing: for Heaven, Hel: for God, the Devill” (130).

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the sign of the cross as “a [demonic] Charme.”27 Like most writers on demonology, Perkins discovers a combination of antithesis and irony at the core of white witchery, or witchery disguised as religion. In the process, he also argues for the commonplace Protestant position connecting Catholicism to sorcery, a charge that informs almost all of the debates about rhetoric, science, and religion in the seventeenth century.

Catholicism, Protestantism, and Demonry The association between Catholicism and demonic inversion accompanied the Reformation from the start. Martin Luther identified elements of the Catholic Church as anti-Christian, and he perceived Pope Leo X quite literally as Antichrist.28 The Catholic Church’s selling of indulgences struck Luther as a prime example of demonic contrariety, where the free gift of God’s salvation suffered an ironic reversal marked by commodity culture. The doctrine of transubstantiation also posed a problem, due to its mystical framework, where priests transformed bread and wine through a process that recalled the occult metonyms of sorcerers. Bartholomew Keckermann, the influential Lutheran philosopher, cogently illustrates this Protestant attitude toward Catholic practices, discovering evidence of witchery in the very affects of priests: Their faces have fickle, wandering, and impudent eyes. They throw their arms about, dance with their feet ..... turn about with varied motion, use inversions, circumlocutions, and regurgitations, and finally gesticulate like mimes with their entire bodies and turn themselves all about because of the mobility of their spirits.29

Keckermann describes demonic possession in this passage, where elocution becomes regurgitation, and where gesture becomes gesticulation. He argues that sacred rhetoric suffers a reversal under the 27. Perkins, Discourse on the Damned Art of Witchcraft, 150–52. 28. See Luther, “The Pagan Servitude of the Church,” in The Reformation Writings of Martin Luther, vol. 1, edited and translated by Bertram Woolf (London: James Clarke, 2002), 208–329. 29. Bartholomew Keckermann, Systema rhetorica (Hanover, 1608), 529.

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weight of Catholic doctrine, signaling to the devout Protestant observer the Devil’s presence. Calvin also warns against Catholicism as a form of witchcraft, referring to Catholic iterative rhetoric as a type of spell casting that leaves audiences and nations open to demonic influences.30 In The World Possessed with Devils (1583), the Calvinist Pierre Viret amplifies the position, arguing that the Catholic idiom is indistinguishable from nefarious conjuration.31 For Viret, Catholic society is precisely that “world” most clearly possessed by devils. The perception of Catholicism as a disguised form of witchcraft carries over into the English Protestant writings on witchcraft, which are in most ways derivative of continental sources (many of which are Catholic, ironically). The Anglican Henry Holland compares Catholic communion to “necromancy” and the sign of the cross to a “witchcraft” gesture.32 George Gifford argues that Rome has “played the witch” in the story of history, while Thomas Cooper suggests that “Witch-craft” is a special “proppe of Antichrists Kingdome,” the Catholic Church.33 Gaule reiterates the argument during the Civil War, suggesting that Catholic societies were more conducive to preternatural sorcery than Reformed societies: “There has been, and are likely still to be, more Witches under the Popish than the Protestant Religion. For not only their Popes, Fryers, nuns (many of them) have been notorious Witches, but their prestigious miracles and superstitious rites [are] little better than kinds of Witchcrafts.”34 Many English Reformers interpreted Catholicism as a form of collusion with demons, occurring under the auspices of righteousness, but accomplishing the opposite (i.e., wickedness). A combination of antithesis and irony once more comes to the forefront. Catholics were thought to be promoting demonry under the guise of repelling it, in what amounts to an inversion of proper religious rhetoric. The intensity with which Protestants perceived Catholics as de30. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. F. L. Battles (2 vols.; Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), vol. 2, 1416. 31. Pierre Viret, The World Possessed with Devils, trans. Thomas Stocker (London, 1583). 32. Holland, A Treatise against Witchcraft, B1v. 33. George Gifford, Sermons upon the Whole Booke of Revelation (London, 1596), 363– 64; Thomas Cooper, Mystery of Witch-Craft (London, 1617), 194. 34. Gaule, Select Cases of Conscience, 16–17.

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monic had not cooled in the late seventeenth century. The same connection between Catholic rhetoric and witchcraft persisted, where Catholic priests appeared as nefarious spell casters to the Anglican new philosophers. Glanvill makes a vehement argument along these lines in Sadducismus triumphatus, connecting various types of “Popish Superstitions” with wicked sorcery.35 In this instance, he speaks for most Anglican new philosophers associated with the Royal Society, which is to say that he speaks for most members of the Royal Society. The Protestant connection between Catholicism and witchcraft was in many circles a pro forma matter. Catholic theologians, of course, made the same types of arguments in the opposite direction, identifying Reformers as the promulgators of demonry. In a relatively early argument against the Church of England, the Marian Catholic John Christopherson, for example, suggests the following in relation to Henry VIII’s rebellion: “The old mens saying was herein verified, that when Antichrist shulde come, the roots of the trees shulde grow upwarde. Was there not beside, such deadly dissention for our diversitie in opinions, that even amonges those, that were mooste verye deare friendes, arose most grevouse hatred.”36 Christopherson perceives in the Reformation a nefarious combination of antithesis and irony, portending the rise of Antichrist. Specifically, the image of trees growing upside down speaks to the preposterousness of Henry VIII’s regime, and the conversion of friendship into hatred reinforces the demonic contrariety. Associating Protestantism with demonry and topsy-turvydom, Christopherson expounds a basic Catholic attitude toward heresy embedded in the Counter Reformation and spanning the English Renaissance. The Catholic writer Robert Rollock amplifies the idea, suggesting that Catholics must detest “Antichrist” for his “sorceries and witchcraftes,” and for Rollock, Protestant heresy operates as a prime example of such sorcery against proper religion.37 The Catholic philosopher Thomas 35. Glanvill, Sadducismus triumphatus, 8. 36. John Christopherson, An Exhortation to All Menne to Take Hede of Rebellion (London, 1554), Ti–Tiiv. 37. Robert Rollock, Lectures upon the First and Second Epistles of Paul to the Thessalonians (Edinburgh, 1606), 64.

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Stapleton makes a similar connection between the Reformation and witchcraft: “There is not a Christian who does not fight against the outrages of heresy and magic” with “equal detestation.”38 Moreover, having dealings with “magicians and witches,” he argues, is equivalent to having dealings “with heretics,” by which he means Reformers.39 Protestantism is a significant form of heresy and witchery, by the standards of Catholic theology in the Renaissance. The two are fundamentally related, as is evidenced by the dominant antimetabole of the Counter Reformation: heresy leads to witchcraft, and witchcraft leads to heresy.40

Women and the Demonic The archetypes of the shrew and the seductress hold special places in late Renaissance discussions of rhetoric, because both were used so often as metonyms for the bad rhetor. These negative types of women represented a high (or low) form of demonic inversion. By early modern standards, to compare a writer’s rhetoric to the rhetoric of a shrew or harlot was unequivocally to involve the Devil in the argument. In fact, the main concern about shrews and harlots was not femininity in and of itself, but rather demonry, or the diabolical corruption of femininity. This is a crucial point that too often gets lost in contemporary discussions of gender roles in Renaissance society. These negative characterizations of women are manifestations of a deeper anxiety about Satan, who uses the rhetoric of perversion to corrupt the world, and this includes the Devil’s project of perverting and destroying women. One of the most intriguing manifestations of the shrew in Renaissance literature is Spencer’s Amazon queen, Radigund. In Radigund, Spencer sets the stage for seventeenth-century understandings of the rhetorical demonry surrounding shrews. After defeating Artegall in battle, Radigund forces him to behave in a feminine way, 38. Thomas Stapleton, Orationes funebres (Antwerp, 1577), 507. 39. Ibid. 40. On the Counter Reformation, see Robert Bireley, Refashioning Catholicism, 1450– 1700: A Reassessment of the Counter Reformation (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1999).

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to dress in women’s clothing, and to perform traditionally feminine domestic duties. Inversion begets inversion, and presumably, if left unchecked, Spencer’s Amazons would turn the whole world upside down through combinations of antithesis and dissimulation. The Amazonian desire to invert natural order made perfect sense to the Renaissance mind, because, as lore had it, the Amazon took for her real husband the Devil himself. Tropologically, the Amazons imitated and yet ironically reversed the order of the convent. They were the Devil’s nuns, in essence, and the world they sought to create was the kingdom of Antichrist. By the time historians of rhetoric reach Thalestris, Pope’s Amazon gnome in The Rape of the Lock (1712), the genuinely occult anxieties conjured up by the image of the Amazon had subsided. Pope goes one step farther, turning the Amazon into a symbol of bathos rather than terror. Something disturbing, however, lurks just below the surface of Thalestris, and this is a recognizable impulse toward cacarchy. Pope’s Amazon continues to perform rituals of inversion that mark demonic rhetoric throughout the Renaissance. The primary danger in the mock epic, the preposterous reversal of order, speaks to this age-old demonic impulse: the rape of the lock stands in for a much larger and more troubling world of demonic topsy-turvydom. While the actual subject of the poem is trivial, the deeper concept is not, as Pope himself later illustrates in the more sober inversions of The Dunciad (1743), where the Queen of Dullness and her horde unleash a seemingly apocalyptic series of inversions. The Amazon represented the most violent form of the shrew in Renaissance thought, but the scolding wife or lover arrived as a close second and also carried the connotation of demonry. Tasso makes the connection explicit in Of Marriage and Wiving (1599): shrews “will neither say nor do any thing but all by contraries, such and so vile is their perverse and Diabolicall nature.”41 Renaissance depictions of Phyllis riding on the back of Aristotle also speak to this concern about shrews. Phyllis corrupts Aristotelian rationality. She operates as a type of succubus that drains life from the victim, all the 41. Torquato Tasso, Of Marriage and Wiving, trans. R. T. (London, 1599), D4v.

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while posing as a Muse. Shakespeare also meditates upon the idea of the shrew, but he does not push the figure to its preternatural conclusion, at least not in the comic Taming of the Shrew. Macbeth is another story. If—by evidence of her inverted rhetoric of power—the shrew was likely to be the Devil’s instrument, then the seductress, by evidence of her inverted rhetoric of love, was equally qualified to be the Devil’s instrument, if not more qualified. After all, love is the most powerful form of power, and its corruption the most dangerous. The image of the orator as a harlot saturated seventeenth-century representations of bad rhetoric. I suspect it was the most common negative trope used to disparage rhetoric in the middle of the century, but why was the image of the harlot so useful? From a theological-rhetorical standpoint, the answer involves demonic antithesis and irony. The harlot, like the shrew, represents a frightening form of diabolical inversion through imitation. She imitates the lover, just as the demonic imitates the divine, all the while undercutting the edifying dynamics of love. Love includes characteristics such as affection, fidelity, and compatibility. The harlot creates an inversion of this relationship, marked by false warmth, promiscuity, and disparity. Or, in other words, the harlot performs a demonic ritual of love and courtship, and the man, almost always characterized as the victim, suffers under this feminine spell, all the while feeling what he perceives (falsely) to be a genuine connection. By analogy, bad rhetors, like harlots, engage in false relationships with their audiences, where feelings of warmth and excitement persist for a moment, but certainly fade at the end of the day. The characteristic painted face of the harlot, or painted language of the bad rhetor, by analogy, is especially notable along these lines, because it reinforces the point that harlotry is a rhetorical masquerade, a form of sophistry. All harlotry is touched by the demonic, based upon the inverted rhetoric of love contained therein, but some harlots were thought to be actual witches, and these were the most dangerous of all. Witches, it should be noted, were in general considered to suffer from intense carnal lust, and so the very existence of witchery implied abnormal and excessive sexuality. As Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger 132   Demonic eloquence

note, “all witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable ..... wherefore for the sake of fulfilling their lusts, they consort even with demons.”42 In the literal meaning of the term, witches were understood to be nymphomaniacs, and, like Amazons, they were considered to be the Devil’s concubines. When witches set out to seduce men, their rhetorical persuasions were considered to be especially nefarious, because in addition to their natural rhetorical abilities to spellbind men (and audiences), they also had preternatural abilities. Moreover, the harlot-witch could make the worse appear the better reason, and so the witch was thought to be especially skilled at that dreadful combination of demonic antithesis and irony, mimicking God’s truths and nature’s ways, but turning them upside down in the process. In this sense, the seventeenth-century harlotwitch recalls the siren of classical literature—undoubtedly the most irresistible manifestation of the seductress in the ancient world. Odysseus tied himself to the mast of his ship in preparation for the siren’s song. He understood the good, and yet at the same time he knew that his own understanding was not enough to prevent him from doing the bad, if the sirens called. Odysseus illustrates a commonplace anxiety throughout the history of rhetoric about the power of evil in beauty’s disguise. Knowing the good leads to doing the good in many systems of classical philosophy, including Plato’s and Aristotle’s, but the sirens appear to challenge even the most knowledgeable and clear-minded heroes. Seventeenth-century English society, of course, did not believe in sirens as such, but the call of the seductive witch was more than enough to disturb even the most rationalistic of philosophers. Late Renaissance writers on witchcraft conceptualized the beautiful witch, like the ancient siren, as capable of luring men to their doom through demonic magic. Ordinary rationality, human-made rationality, was itself pushed to the limit, if not beyond, in those moments of amorous witchery. Statistically, there were more than enough men diagnosed as holding pacts with the Devil to challenge the assumption at the time that witchcraft was necessarily feminine in nature, and yet 42. Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, Malleus maleficarum, ed. Montague Summers (London: John Rodker, 1928), 122.

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the representation of witchcraft as a feminine enterprise persisted throughout the Renaissance.43 Why? The answer requires an understanding of how ideas about demonic rhetoric worked in the witchcraft books and demonologies of the age. The feminine sorcerer represented an extreme form of inverted natural order, because the woman was conceived to be the more gentle gender. In order for the demonic inversion to have its strongest impact, it made sense in the late Renaissance logic of perverse inversion for the Devil to elevate the female sorcerer above all others. From a demonic standpoint, the more topsy-turvy the situation became, the better, and female violence, all things considered, was more topsy-turvy than male violence. Although the male witch was certainly a disturbing manifestation of demonic inversion, the female witch—and not the warlock—became the archetypal human example of such inversion, in large part because of the rhetorical mind-set involving antithesis and irony. The serious male counterpart of the harlot-witch was not the warlock, but rather the fraudulent male priest or minister, which brings us back to concerns about white magic in the Renaissance, and, more broadly, to concerns about the corruption of the priesthood. There is here an underlying point for philosophers of rhetoric to appreciate. A rhetorical mentality functions at the very center of the witchcraft controversies in the early modern period. In order to understand the sinister workings of bewitchment, the astute observer needed to perform a rhetorical critique, paying special attention to combinations of antithesis and irony. That is, rhetorical training helped individuals to recognize demonry, making such instruction hugely important, given the widespread anxiety about witchery at the time. The witchcraft documents, however, remain as some of the least studied documents in the rhetorical tradition, in large part because most researchers assume that they exist far outside of the tradition’s appropriate territory. Quite the opposite is true. The demonic literature of the late Renaissance yields some of the clearest 43. See Robin Briggs, “Witchcraft and the Problem of Multiple Explanation,” in Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jonathan Barry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 49–63.

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evidence showing how the seventeenth-century mentality revolved around rhetorical thinking, where the ability to recognize demonic contrariety operated as a quintessential capacity for the wellinformed intellectual.44

Misrule Combinations of antithesis and antiphrasis play a major role in one of the most common social festivals of the Renaissance, the masquerade fair, where participants often dressed as inimical versions of themselves. Describing the mind-set of the Renaissance masquerade, Terry Castle notes the special function of antithesis: “If one may speak of the rhetoric of masquerade, the tropology of costume, the controlling figure was the antithesis: one was obliged to impersonate a being opposite, in one essential feature, to oneself.”45 Such festivals were ubiquitous, as Keith Thomas describes, and had deep roots in the Roman Saturnalia, which is why C. L. Barber refers to the entire Renaissance proclivity toward masquerading as the “Saturnalian pattern.”46 Given the inversionary rhetoric at work in masquerading, the witchcraft writers almost always took notice of the activity as potentially demonic, if not overtly so. Kramer and Sprenger make the commonplace argument, observing that masquerade festivals often coincided with sacred ceremonies, and just as often inverted them, creating demonic parodies of the divine. “Witches,” they argue, “use 44. On rhetoric and the Renaissance mentality, see Heinrich Plett, Rhetoric and Renaissance Culture (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004); Paul Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and Its Sources (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 242–60. See also Richard Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976); Hanna Gray, “Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of Eloquence,” Journal of the History of Ideas 24 (1963): 497–514; C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954); Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947); Donald Clark, Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1922). On rhetoric and antithetical thinking, see Thomas Sloane, On the Contrary: The Protocol of Traditional Rhetoric (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1997). 45. Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1986), 5. 46. C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959), 3.

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these reveries of the devil for their own advantage, and work their spells.”47 The Cromwellian nonconformists of the Interregnum held a similar view, especially toward the masquerade rituals that occurred during the Christmas holiday, causing them in 1652 to attempt unsuccessfully to expunge Christmas from English society. Their rationale was simple: such celebrations often continued to participate in deeply ingrained patterns of misrule, which is to say that they were taken as demonic in nature. Fortunately, Christmas persisted. Of late, philosophers and historians of rhetoric have romanticized the inversionary impulses of the Renaissance masquerade fair, perceiving such festivals as sites of polyphony.48 Such celebratory readings of the masquerade are derived from Mikhail Bakhtin’s influential analysis of the Renaissance carnival. Bakhtin identified such masquerades as sites of pluralism and unrestrained satire, which supposedly gave rise to dynamic political spaces.49 From his standpoint, masquerades also had an important epistemological component. Through parody, the Renaissance Saturnalia called into question prevailing truths and authorities.50 Bakhtin, however, misread the festival’s rhetorical architectonic. The Renaissance masquerade was not a polyphonic political site. The festival, strictly governed by the rhetoric of inversion, instead simply replaced one idea of hierarchical order with another idea, an often exaggerated and depraved version of order, bringing us back to Boguet’s concept of cacarchy, a kind of demonic topsy-turvydom.51 If the masquerade had an edifying purpose, it was not to destroy the structures in place, or even to question “prevailing truths and authorities,” but rather it was to reinforce those structures by clarifying them against their perverse contrarieties and disturbing doppelgangers. 47. Kramer and Sprenger, Malleus maleficarum, 257. 48. Wayne Rebhorn cites the masquerade as a place for political progressivism and epistemological pluralism. See Rebhorn, Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995), 17. 49. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 74–83. 50. Ibid., 11. 51. Boguet, Examen of Witches, 14–15.

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In its appropriate manifestation, the masquerade’s rhetoric becomes a form of stably ironic criticism, which ultimately exposes absolute differences between good and evil, thus reinforcing the proper structures of order.52 In this sense, as Castle notes, masquerades operated as vehicles of comic enlightenment, because they “intensified awareness of the structure being violated” and ultimately “fortified” the structure’s regularity against the forces of demonry and misrule.53 James I provides a similar explanation for why he explores the nature of demonic inversions in his Daemonologie: “There can be no better way to know God, then by the contrarie.”54 James comes much closer than Bakhtin to apprehending the purpose of the masquerade’s rhetoric. The masquerade as a proto-pluralistic site of social liberation is a Romantic invention that erases the Augustinian theology of contrariety at work in the Renaissance festival, where the absolute struggle between Christ and the Devil manifests itself in every nook, cranny, and embedded clause of existence. Put differently, there is too much ambivalence in Romantic notions of the masquerade, and this causes a wishy-washy, unstable perception of good and evil. This is not what Renaissance masquerading accomplished. In one form or another, these festivals were enactments of antithetical thinking in a metaphysical sense, which ultimately strengthened the traditional Christian structures in place. More than radical Romantic philosophy, the methods of Christian psychoanalysis help to explain the possible social benefits (and perils) of the masquerade phenomenon in Renaissance Europe. From a spiritual-psychological standpoint, the festivals appear as cathartic events in which otherwise religiously inclined people performed hypocrisy as a way to purge it from the self and from the community.55 Such a reading keeps with the more ancient connotation of “hypocrisy” as a theater term related to an actor’s perfor52. On the importance of stable irony in rhetorical criticism, see C. Jan Swearingen, Rhetoric and Irony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Wayne Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 1–27. 53. Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, 87–88. 54. James I, Daemonologie, 55. 55. For more on this method, see John Perry, Tillich’s Response to Freud (Lanham, Md.: University of America Press, 1988).

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mance. By this account, masquerading becomes a kind of staged enactment of the destructive tendencies of the self, and of society, in an effort to expose and then expunge those inclinations. In its edifying form, masquerading is a kind of passion play, functioning as a bizarre type of personal and social confession. Properly manifested misrule, in other words, is a type of pedagogy—one that often leads to laughter and comic enlightenment. Such an understanding of the masquerade stems in large part from the medieval and Renaissance tradition of sacred parody, where participants used a form of stable irony to expose through playacting the despair of demonry. Above all other rhetorical dynamics, clear-headed irony is crucial in such circumstances. Unstable irony, contrarily, leads to the sort of ambiguity that departs from the Augustinian conceptual architecture of the Renaissance fair. At the same time, masquerade fairs often had a reputation for Epicurean-style revelry, which looked more like demonic possession than uplifting social confession. In many cases, the Renaissance festivals of misrule carried with them undertones of unrestrained decadence. Beyond a certain point, this mode of behavior departed from structures of edification, bringing us back to the legitimate concerns about masquerading and demonry expressed by the witchcraft writers of the age.

Satan’s Idiom Renaissance theologians and natural philosophers set out to distinguish between the human idiom and the Devil’s nefarious idiom, which the Devil often disguises as an uplifting form of rhetoric, though for inhumane purposes. The Devil wants the opposite of what God wants, not a loving relationship with humanity, but rather a destructive relationship with humanity, built ultimately around concepts of self-loathing, fear, and isolation. In order to accomplish this antithesis of a loving relationship, the Devil employs rhetoric that mimics God’s loving rhetoric. A coercive strategy would hardly serve the Devil’s purpose, which is to say that Satan seldom attempts compulsion, but often attempts persuasion. The Devil is a diabolical sophist. Through inversionary tropes, Satan tries to subvert God’s 138   Demonic eloquence

breath in humanity, turning the human voice away from heaven and toward hell, away from edifying spiritual rhetoric and toward perverse idioms. The Devil attempts to unspeak reality, as most Renaissance demonologies figure Satan’s rhetoric. Demonic rhetoric has as its purpose the undoing of God’s creation. In an attempt at wicked metonyming, the Devil strikes out at creation by substituting preposterous rhetoric for the Word, lies for Truth, approaching the human voice in particular as the place in which to establish his project of unspeaking the cosmos. Against the breath of life, the Devil forwards the language of death, putting the rhetoric of despair in the mouths of human intermediaries, which for the Christian philosophers of the Renaissance constituted a kind of sound and fury signifying nothing. This is what makes Shakespeare’s final soliloquy for Macbeth a masterstroke. Shakespeare apprehends the rhetorical project of demonry as clearly as any writer of the age. Macbeth’s full possession arrives at that moment when his own rhetoric rests transparently upon the kingdom that established it—the realm of the demonic—a place of frigidity and despair: To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.                (VI.vi.19–28)

Macbeth, or rather Macbeth’s evil genius, gives sound to the final soliloquy, where the human Macbeth succumbs to the demonic idiom that infects his language throughout the tragedy. Shakespeare reinforces this linguistic frigidity in the most literal way, characterizing Macbeth’s own increasing sense of physical and psychological Demonic eloquence    139

coldness. At the end of the tragedy, Macbeth loses all warmth, rhetorically and metaphysically, recalling the cold dead center of hell. The Devil attempts to work through the human voice to destroy the world, a point that clarifies why every demonology in the Renaissance is a treatise about rhetoric, and, moreover, why every substantial account of demonic possession in the Renaissance involves striking elements of elocution. Demonic possession is in an important sense a rhetorical condition. The rhetorical tradition informs the Renaissance science of demonology, and Renaissance demonology informs the rhetorical tradition. In Satan’s Rhetoric, for instance, Armando Maggi rightly suggests that Renaissance demonology is in several respects a discipline rooted in rhetoric and grammar: “could we not say that the innumerable treatises on demonology written in premodern and modern Europe—starting from the late fifteenthcentury Formicarius and Malleus maleficarum” and “continuing to the repetitious manuals still composed during the Enlightenment—are in fact grammar books, obsessive attempts to define the idiom exchanged between these two radical solitudes” that is, “humanity” and “Satan”?56 There is, of course, a longstanding association between grammar and magic in the Western tradition. The etymologies of the terms themselves overlap. The magician’s grimoire operates as a kind of esoteric grammar and rhetoric, and effective spell casting itself requires careful study of rhetoric’s canons.57 The magician (or witch) becomes at once an accomplished sorcerer and orator. Maggi shows that Renaissance demonologies have as a central theme the exploration of the Devil’s language, and, more generally, of the rhetorical tradition. The implicit imperative is that students of demonology must learn to recognize distinctions between demonic and divine instantiations of tropes, and so students of demonology must also become students of rhetoric and grammar. Theological insight depends upon it, as does the ability to guard against the 56. Armando Maggi, Satan’s Rhetoric (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 2. 57. Jacqueline de Romilly makes interesting connections among rhetoric, grammar, and magic in ancient Greece. See Magic and Rhetoric in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975). See also John Ward, “Rhetoric and Magic from Antiquity to the Renaissance,” Rhetorica 6 (1988): 57–118.

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demonic impulse toward rhetorical inversion, which threatens not only the individual, but also society at large. While theorizing rhetorical demonry, however, Maggi erases the crucial ontological difference between demons and humans, which in turn causes him to discover a kind of odd commiseration between the “radical solitudes” of the two groups.58 This is a faulty claim of equivalency that simply does not resonate in the theological systems of the period. In foregrounding a connection between these solitudes, Maggi misrepresents the relationship between humanity and Pandemonium, including the rhetorical capabilities therein. In the Christian worldview of the late Renaissance, and in mainstream Catholic and Protestant doctrine today, Christ’s death redeems humanity and allows for communion with God, setting humanity on a middle ground between God and the Devil, not in a place of radical isolation commensurable with demonic solitude. Maggi’s analysis of the demonic suffers from the same categorical problem that Stanley Fish perpetuates in Surprised by Sin, and that Romantic poets such as Blake and Percy Shelly also perpetuated. Like these writers, Maggi sees an odd commiseration between Satan and humanity, or sees Satan as a kind of kindred spirit, even a protagonist, an Aristotelian-style tragic hero who relates to the human condition in a strangely sympathetic way. The Devil’s emptiness of Being, however, could not be farther removed from that which constitutes humanity as humanity in its most edifying form: God’s breath. The Devil’s purpose is not to relate to humanity, and neither is it to commiserate even for a moment with humanity, but rather it is to destroy humanity, often through the mask (the false tropes) of friendship and commiseration. A second complication of the argument in Satan’s Rhetoric involves method, an especially complex topic with respect to Renaissance demonology. Maggi describes his method as one of “credulous suspension of disbelief,” where he sets aside modern rationality, good sense, believability, propriety, and the like, all in an attempt to meet Renaissance demonologists on their own terms.59 Invoking a 58. Maggi, Satan’s Rhetoric, 2.

59. Ibid., 4.

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Husserlian bracket, Maggi pretends to believe in spiritual ideas that his contemporary readership will undoubtedly find “naive, preposterous, and laughable.”60 Of course, in the very act of admitting his credulous suspension of disbelief in the way that he does—so as not to appear naive to his imagined audience of skeptics—Maggi closes off avenues of deep understanding. He even performs an unwitting paralepsis, sending an underlying message that anything other than modern skepticism toward Renaissance demonology proves inchoate, despite his quasi-suspension of disbelief. Maggi defers to the judgments of disbelievers entirely. Like most contemporary critics of Renaissance demonology, he reduces the phenomenon of demonry to a fairy tale of sorts. Unlike D. P. Walker, however, who argues straightforwardly that writers on demonology “should not ask their readers to accept supernatural phenomena,” Maggi takes an indirect route, attempting a phenomenological ruse, but simultaneously insisting upon the silliness of the ruse in the process of forwarding it.61 Maggi and Walker carry out the same skeptical analysis of Renaissance demonology, in other words, but at least Walker is forthcoming about it. Both writers apply doubting methods. By doing so, they obfuscate some of the existential and metaphysical presuppositions of Renaissance spirituality, presuppositions that can be deeply understood only by belief. Put differently, they do not take to heart the idea of a spiritual world, which limits their understandings, thus illustrating the opposite impulse captured by the ancient proverb expressed by Augustine: “For understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore do not seek to understand in order to believe, but believe that thou may understand.”62 Contrarily, in the spirit of modern skepticism, they doubt in an effort to understand, and they continue to doubt, as if to accept only the first of Descartes’s six meditations. There is no simple method by which to approach the topic of de60. Ibid. 61. Walker, Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (London: Scolar Press, 1981), 15. 62. Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, trans. John Rettig (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1994), 29:6.

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monic rhetoric in Renaissance demonology. Nonetheless, those who believe in a spiritual world usually have an advantage over skeptics, in part because the impulses to mock, dismiss, and qualify ad infinitum go by the wayside, allowing non-skeptical philosophers to approach the ideas with more discernment. Certain beliefs and faiths open avenues of spiritual and visceral understanding in a way that skepticism simply cannot open, or avenues that are obscured by the weight of disbelief, which is the larger danger when approaching Renaissance demonology. I do not wish to push this argument at great length, but only to observe that belief in spiritual realities allows for certain kinds of understandings about demonological texts that skeptical stances never achieve. Maybe I am stating the obvious. Clark moves in this direction methodologically in Thinking with Demons, away from secular realism and materialism, which perhaps explains why his book is more insightful than most studies of Renaissance demonology. Belief in spiritual realities in no way guarantees deeper understanding of Renaissance demonology, but as a starting disposition, belief allows for understanding. Even though he avoids belief, Maggi comprehends this basic argument, and presumably agrees with it. Otherwise, he would not attempt his phenomenological suspension of disbelief in the first place.

Conclusion: The New Plain Style as Rhetorical Cure Most members of the Royal Society wholeheartedly accepted the existence of demonic language. They made regular use of the category. Almost all of them were theologically motivated, and they were mindful of evil spirits. The new scientists predicated many of their critiques of enchanted language upon the category of demonic rhetoric, associating all claims of rhetorical charming with nefarious preternaturalism. By the Royal Society’s standards, those who practiced magic made a pact with the Devil, whether wittingly or unwittingly. Consequently, they suffered at least a degree of rhetorical possession (fascination, obsession) as a result. Given the scientific rejection of occult philosophy, all claims of magical rhetorical efficacy took on demonic auras, and subsequently cast a bad light, “a darkness visible,” upon those defenders of occultism (Milton, Demonic eloquence    143

Paradise Lost, I.63). Moreover, the Devil’s idiom crept into human discourse in many ways, by experimental standards. Sprat’s emphasis upon rhetorical bewitchment in his History directly speaks to this point, as do Glanvill’s concerns in Sadducismus triumphatus about the transmogrifications of witches.63 Locke’s references to the Devil’s persuasions show that even the most empirically driven of the new philosophers held as a bedrock presupposition the idea that Satan desired to bewitch humanity. This connection between enchanted rhetoric and demonic possession reveals an additional layer of intrigue in the plain language reforms. The new plain style functioned as rhetorical protection against demonic possession, which may sound strange to the modern secular reader, but as an idea it resonated powerfully in seventeenthcentury England. Importantly, too, it resonated as a scientific precept. In a theological-medical way, the plain style was a verbal cure, an especially relevant cure, given the nature of demonic possession as a rhetorical condition. Writers who used a plain style (i.e., a nonenchanted style) defended themselves against the influences of demonic idioms, because plain writing was a thoroughly natural mode of rhetoric in this context, as opposed to a preternatural or supernatural mode. Protection against demonry in the form of plainness proved especially useful in the Restoration, where diabolical enthusiasm remained as a major threat to Anglican orthodoxy and modern science. When Sprat insisted that intellectuals should write with a plain style, there was a crucial theological purpose underlying his argument. He appreciated the opposite impulse, composition inspired by preternatural methods, which exposed writers and audiences alike to demonic influences, putting individuals, congregations, and governments in danger of bewitchment. Demonic enthusiasm was a rhetorical contagion that threatened to infect the world, or did infect the world. In response, the new experimentalists forwarded the new plain style as a cure to rhetorical demonry broadly imagined (e.g., witchcraft, ceremonial magic). That is, plainness counteracted the Devil’s discourses. 63. Sprat, History of the Royal Society, 111.

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Almost all of the Royal Society’s philosophers saw themselves simultaneously as exorcists of an informal type, dispelling through plainness what they perceived to be the venomous auras of Renaissance witchery, those wraith-like rhetorical mists that Cowley describes in his ode to the Royal Society. Importantly, however, the new plain style was not a form of counter-magic, in the way that the Red Cross Knight’s enchanted shield provides iconic countermagic to the dragon’s shield-like eyes in the Faerie Queen. In Spencer’s charmed universe, magic operates as a system open to positive and negative influences, white spell casting and diabolical spell casting, where anti-magic itself functions as a form of magic. Contrarily, the plain style stood apart from the world of sorcery entirely. Plainness operated on the principles of non-magic, or what experimental philosophers in the Renaissance began to call “the new philosophy.”

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Chapter 5

Mer ic Cas aubon on R he tor ical Ent hus i a sm

)( In the first two parts of this book (chapters 1–4), I advanced a theory of language reform in seventeenthcentury English writing, one that requires an understanding of the period’s conflicts between mystery and modern science. The purpose of the final part (chapters 5 and 6) is to show how Meric Casaubon and John Dryden exemplify the new philosophy of plainness. They are cases in point. In more general terms, too, I demonstrate how these writers anticipate the emergence of key Enlightenment rhetorical ideals, not the least of which is an overdependence upon imperturbable detachment at the expense of all things dappled, fiery, and sublime. Casaubon and Dryden champion plain rhetoric and condemn bewitchment and enthusiasm, which for both writers are the primary linguistic causes of England’s tumult. Moreover, in light of the preceding parts of the book, Casaubon and Dryden appear more obviously as critical figures in the history of rhetoric. Casaubon’s work, seldom discussed, comes into sight as a major statement in English rhe146

torical studies, and Dryden’s rhetoric, while often considered, has not yet been seen by critics as an interesting turning point in the battle between magic and new philosophy. Dryden’s style marks a definitive rejection of Renaissance occultism and a dramatic invention of Enlightenment urbanity, and as such it nicely punctuates the achievement of English rhetorical reform—first initiated by Bacon’s argument against magical tropes in The Advancement of Learning. Dryden needs no introduction, but will nonetheless get one in the next chapter, while Casaubon needs too much of an introduction. Paul Korshin and Michael Spiller allude to Casaubon’s significance in rhetorical studies, but they do not pursue the idea beyond that, and neither have others. There is every reason, I argue, to put Casaubon at the very center of Interregnum rhetoric. He provides what is probably the most sophisticated theory of rhetorical enthusiasm in late Renaissance England, and as a topic, few things were timelier than the study of enthusiasm. Additionally, Casaubon locates demonic eloquence—the most dangerous form of enthusiasm—at the heart of bad politics, which for him and other Anglicans was an issue of considerable interest in the 1650s, at the height of nonconformist rule. Casaubon makes these arguments in the Treatise Concerning Enthusiasm (1655), where he lays groundwork for the Enlightenment rhetorical sensibility broadly understood. The key chapter for my purposes is “Of Rhetoricall Enthusiasm,” in which Casaubon provides a thoroughgoing critique of charmed rhetoric. His aim is to diagnose and dispel enthusiastic rhetoric in all of its manifestations, natural and preternatural. As a way of curing such discursive ailments, Casaubon advances the idea of a properly plain style based upon new science and Anglican orthodoxy.1 Equipped with a nonenchanted idiom, natural philosophers emerge in the Treatise as 1. Michael Hunter characterizes Casaubon as an antagonist of the new science, but what Casaubon truly opposed was crude utilitarianism (Hunter, “The Debate Over Science,” in The Restored Monarchy, 1660–1688, ed. J. Jones [London: Macmillan, 1979], 176– 95). Against this position, Casaubon forwarded a more humanistic version of science, still grounded in cause and effect relationships, Baconian experimentalism, and so forth, but also informed by other theological concerns and traditions. For more on Casaubon’s philosophy, see Michael Heyd, “Be Sober and Reasonable”: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 72–91.

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champions of civilization, righteous orators committed to building a modern world upon learning’s advancements. New philosophers also appear as informal public exorcists, which is perhaps the book’s most provocative thesis. Casaubon calls upon experimentalists to purge from society the demonic tropes that dominate Interregnum discourses, in hopes of making England once more a safe place to read, write, and speak. In this way, Casaubon foreshadows the Royal Society’s plain language reforms, anticipating in particular Sprat’s argument against rhetorical bewitchment in The History of the Royal Society. Indeed, exactly like Sprat, Casaubon forwards a plain style in order to counteract demonic rhetoric, which for both writers is the primary cause of England’s Civil War.

Enthusiasm Casaubon devotes a brief introduction to defining enthusiasm, drawing primarily from Plato and Plutarch. Here, he establishes several categories of the phenomenon: divinatory, philosophical, rhetorical, poetical, and precatory or prayerful. These classifications become the subjects of individual chapters. The chapter on rhetorical enthusiasm is the most significant (a judgment shared by Korshin), because it casts a useful light upon the entire text: mode of rhetoric functions in every chapter as the clearest indicator of enthusiasm, or lack thereof. Casaubon mentions but does not analyze other types of enthusiasm, including “amatorie” and “mechanical.”2 I am surprised that he does not pursue the former, given the seemingly endless collection of fascinating love-gone-wrong scenarios in classical literature, from which he draws many of his illustrations. Then again, love is more difficult to theorize than most subjects. In the case of the latter, mechanical enthusiasm, Casaubon has in mind materialistic worldviews, which he and many other Anglicans perceived as a form of sadducism, not to mention Epicureanism.3 Casaubon allots the most energy to the topic of rhetoric, mainly 2. Casaubon, A Treatise Concerning Enthusiasm, ed. Paul Korshin (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1970), 16, 23. 3. While Casaubon missed an opportunity to critique mechanical enthusiasm, Swift did not: A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit (1704) provides one of the most intriguing and severe rejections of mechanical philosophy in the period.

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because rhetorical enthusiasm touches all types of enthusiasm under discussion. An experimentally minded philosopher, he first sets out to determine the “causes” of enthusiastic rhetoric, and also the “effect” that such “Rhetorick ..... produce[s] upon others.”4 On the question of causation, he argues that many instances of enthusiastic rhetoric emerge from a “natural ardor” that too often gets mistaken for supernatural activity. Much rhetorical enthusiasm, in other words, stems from the following: A Heat, a fervent Heat, a Fire; which powerful Orators found in themselves, not at the uttering, thought then greatest, but upon another consideration; but in conceiving and composing their speeches; so generally observed and acknowledged, that some have thought that no other art or thing was necessary to make a perfect Orator; that Heat, that fervent Heat, that Fire, hath been the ignis fatuus, we say, that hath infatuated many speakers into that opinion of divine Inspiration.5

Of particular note, Casaubon disavows the idea that a “perfect orator” needs “no other art or thing” but fervor. This is an Anglican caricature of the evangelical street preacher, one rooted in the Puritan rejection of the catechism and other forms of regulated spiritual rhetoric, and one rooted as well in the Puritan preference for Peter Ramus over Aristotle and Quintilian. The Anglicans deplored such nonconformist refutations of classical heuristics in favor of mystical eloquence, and this is Casaubon’s main point. He argues that those who abandon formal training in pursuit of furor rhetoricus are often self-deceived, infatuated by the idea of divine inspiration at the expense of sound reason and proper invention—elements that for most proto-Enlightenment thinkers are the true foundations of inspired rhetoric. Casaubon, at the same time, readily admits to the reality of “influentia divina.”6 For example, he acknowledges the fire of “holy Prophets.”7 His argument, however, is that genuinely supernatural 4. Casaubon, Treatise Concerning Enthusiasm, 215. On Casaubon’s philosophy of science, see Michael R. G. Spiller, Meric Casaubon and the Royal Society (The Hague: Martinus Nijoff, 1980). 5. Casaubon, Treatise Concerning Enthusiasm, 215–16. 6. Ibid., 219. 7. Ibid.

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inspiration must be distinguished from natural zeal, which in and of itself is neither good nor evil: “zeal, or fervent heat, ..... is of itself no more to true godlinesse and religion, than a good voice” or “an eloquent tongue, or anything else of that same kind.”8 By “Grace” and “good intentions,” such natural ardor might be called “a zeal for God,” Casaubon explains, but it is not good in and of itself. Rather, it must be “guided by a true light, that is, by sound and orthodox principles.”9 In order to distinguish between proper and diabolical forms of inspired rhetoric, Casaubon appeals to “orthodox principles” as evidence in the positive sense. Contrarily, he points to “false doctrine[s]” as evidence in the negative sense.10 Regarding orthodox principles, he has in mind the “new philosophy,” “good Catechizing,” and “the Christian faith.”11 He does not mention kinds of sentence structures as indicators of appropriately inspired eloquence, and this is highly significant. Casaubon makes a philosophical distinction, not a syntactical one, between properly and improperly inspired rhetoric. Syntax in and of itself provides little insight into the difference between Godly and nefarious eloquence, because the Devil mimics the divine, as do cunning men and women who misuse natural zeal—which then becomes demonic zeal. “Very commonly,” Casaubon notes, “ardor” becomes “the instrument of carnal ends and affections,” and, “misguided” by “false doctrine,” eventually becomes “devilish zeal.”12 A student of demonology, Casaubon appreciates the nature of demonic dissimulation, and in fact foregrounds it. Consequently, he turns to the procedures of orthodox Anglicanism and new experimentalism to differentiate between demonic and divine eloquence. If a specific philosophy of rhetoric works against Anglican science (e.g., Teutonic magic, Puritan oratory), then the style in question is deemed shadowy. Casaubon, in other words, is a plain style advocate in the philosophical sense of “plainness.” The focus in the Treatise is upon the ontological aura of a given rhetorical style, rather than upon the shapes of sentences. 8. Ibid. 10. Ibid., 115. 12. Ibid., 219.

9. Ibid. 11. Ibid.

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On the question of rhetorical enthusiasm’s effect, Casaubon argues that natural fervor influences the speaker as much as the listener, which explains why enthusiasts are convinced by their own enthusiasm. He makes this point in the chapter upon precatory enthusiasm: “Of the power of language in general, we have treated in the chapter of Rhetoricall Enthusiasme. And that it hath the same power, to raise the same passions and affections upon the speakers, or bare utterers, as it hath upon the Auditors [is so obvious] that no question of it can be made.”13 The self is an audience to the self in rhetorical matters, Casaubon suggests. The self persuades the self: “All writers of Rhetorick insist upon it largely, and conclude generally, that he can never be a perfect Orator, whose speech hath not the same, or greater power upon himself, as he would have it to have upon others.”14 For evidence, Casaubon paraphrases a passage from the second book of Cicero’s De oratorio: “Such is the nature of speech, that though it be intended and undertaken to move others, yet it worketh upon the speaker himself no lesse, (if not more) than it doth upon any that hear it.”15 In brief, Casaubon argues that inspired orators are not immune to their own rhetoric. And, by logical inference, they are not immune to their own enthusiasm. This second point is crucial. We discover here one of the earliest experimental-rhetorical models of selfdeception, which for Casaubon is born out of a self-generated rhetorical heat—a force that influences the individual wielding it as much as the audience experiencing it. If unregulated, such fervor overthrows the rational faculty of the self, thus moving the will in a bad direction (a decidedly Baconian rhetorical architectonic). Moreover, by implication, such fervor has the potential to overthrow the rational tendencies of an entire society, for example, internecine England. From the standpoint of Anglican theology and science, Casaubon provides a cogent linguistic theory for diagnosing England’s Civil War. Rhetorical enthusiasm feeds upon itself and so perpetuates its own coherence. Put differently, Casaubon observes what Shakespeare observed a few decades earlier through the character of Macbeth: 13. Ibid., 276. 15. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

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Thou marvel’st at my words: but hold thee still; Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.                (III.ii.54–55)

This is one of Shakespeare’s most profound observations, because with it comes a kinetic understanding of evil’s idiom, where nefarious utterances constitute not only a moment, but also a momentum, or style. Macbeth’s gradual demonic possession becomes stronger as it feeds upon its own internal consistencies. Likewise, rhetorical enthusiasm “makes strong itself by ill,” and it does so on both a personal and a social level. Enthusiastic orators move themselves toward frenzy to the same degree that they move others toward frenzy. Essentially, this is Casaubon’s implicit explanation of how nonconformist radicalism works as a social dynamic, leading ultimately to mass demonic possession, “devilish zeal,” and war.16 If this seems strange as a diagnosis—the English Civil War as promulgated by mass demonic possession—it is only strange by virtue of our distance from mainstream seventeenth-century cosmology, where the study of angels, devils, and principalities functions as an important area of scientific inquiry, perhaps even at the center of natural philosophy. Witchcraft, for instance, operates as a normal topic in philosophical research.17 In other words, not only is Casaubon’s diagnosis of the Civil War plausible in the context of seventeenth-century latitudinarian philosophy, but it is also scientific. In the twentieth century, Thomas Mann comes to a similar diagnosis of World War II in Faustus, albeit less scientifically, by modern skeptical standards. Adrian Leverkuhn, the protagonist, stands in for German fascism, and his gradual possession mirrors the gradual possession of the Nazis. The idea that natural rhetorical enthusiasm easily becomes demonic rhetorical enthusiasm pervades the Treatise. It furthermore reveals Casaubon’s complex diagnosis of Interregnum nonconformity, which he perceives as often starting with very good intentions. 16. Ibid., 219. 17. See Clark, “The Scientific Status of Demonology,” in Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, 351–74.

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In fact, Casaubon concedes the point that many Interregnum mystics begin with an earnest search for truth. “Once estaticall,” however, they open themselves to the “Devil,” who takes advantage of mystical “distemper[s].”18 That is, the Devil leads zealous orators and audiences astray. The ultimate consequence of such rhetorical enthusiasm, Casaubon insists, is madness or demonic possession, or worse yet, both: “yet to commend [ecstatic rhetoric] to ordinary people ... ..is to perswade them to madnesse; and to expose them to the illusions of the Devil.”19 Reinforcing his diagnosis, Casaubon provides a somewhat contemporary example—the king of Moscovia—“that horrid Hellhound” who makes “Nero, Caligala, and the fiercest Tyrants of ancient times” appear as “merciful men.”20 This king, who lived in the day of “Q. Elizab.,” used his enthusiastic devotions to move himself and many others falsely. He “pretend[ed]” unto “God and Heaven” through “feigned Visions and Revelations,” Casaubon notes, all the while delving into deeper levels of violence and despair.21 In turn, the “Devil” appeared to him “in the shape of an Angel of light to encourage him the better in those inhumane courses.”22 By Casaubon’s precepts, the king slowly but surely suffered a demonic possession, and through enthusiastic rhetoric he infected the entire kingdom. This is for Casaubon—and for many other philosophers—the major danger of rhetorical enthusiasm, the demonic possession of large groups of people, which often happens under the nefarious disguise of benevolent governance. Why does Casaubon choose this sixteenth-century example? He alludes to Moscovia’s king in order to argue by allegory. The narrative warns of the dangers of enthusiastic leadership: Cromwell is the implicit target. By telling the story in the context that he does, Casaubon constructs a parallel between Moscovian enthusiasm and evangelical nonconformism. Like the enthusiast from a faraway land, the English Puritan mystics imitate the style of “earnest prayer,” by Casaubon’s Anglican standards. But they simultaneously undercut true theology, because they depart from the Church of Eng18. Casaubon, Treatise Concerning Enthusiasm, 286. 19. Ibid., 171. 20. Ibid., 279. 21. Ibid., 280. 22. Ibid.

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land, “after which they need no more; no Sacraments, no Sermons, no Scripture, to make them perfect.”23 Nonconformist mystics appear to suffer demonic possession, exactly like the King of Moscovia and his cohorts. This is the implicit argument against evangelical mysticism in the Treatise. Moreover, all of these nonconformists suffer for the same reason. They abandon the procedures of religious orthodoxy and new science, instead pursuing ecstatic epiphanies. Consequently, their sincere zeal turns into unregulated enthusiasm or “direct Witchcraft.”24 Importantly, too, Casaubon recognizes demonry not in sentence structures or tropes, but rather in the overall gestalt of nonconformist theology. His critique focuses upon philosophical-rhetorical frameworks, rather than syntactical technicalities. That is, the distinction between good and evil religious eloquence is the fundamental concern. In addition to a Renaissance possession narrative (i.e., King of Moscovia), Casaubon also looks to the classical world for illustrations of infernal rhetoric, foregrounding Orpheus and the Greek oracles as prime examples. He starts with Orpheus, describing him as a “fanatic,” if he existed at all.25 Using paralepsis, Casaubon questions the reality of the Orphic myth: “I will not take advantage of Aristotle’s opinion, as it is affirmed by Tully, that there never was any such man really as Orpheus.”26 Even if Orpheus was a myth, however, the cult of Orphic magic persisted, celebrating the orator’s seemingly supernatural eloquence: “the poor ignorant multitude being thoroughly possessed ..... were more inclined to purchase those pretended Orphical charms and expiations” than to follow edifying rhetorical paths.27 Orphic magic appears as one more system of demonic rhetoric in the Treatise. Moreover, in this passage, as elsewhere, Casaubon has little interest in correcting syntax. He worries instead about nefarious enchantment—the “charms and expiations” of Orphic occultism. And while ancient theology and its English Neoplatonic manifestations are his clear targets, Casaubon also creates an indirect argument against Catholicism, especially the Catho23. Ibid., 284–85. 25. Ibid., 9. 27. Ibid.

24. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 12.

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lic fervor toward relics. The accoutrements of Orphic magic operate pro forma as metonyms for Catholic artifacts. This is an uncontroversial allegory among Anglicans in Interregnum England, and one that Casaubon foreshadows in the book’s preface. Here, he complains about the rhetorical accoutrements of a celebrated French nun, as discussed in The Life of Sister Katharine of Jesus, printed in Paris in 1628 and containing the “strange raptures” and “enthusiasms” of a “melancholic.”28 The Greek oracles are also a target in the Treatise, and—through a thinly veiled analogy—so are the Interregnum astrologers and diviners, of which there was never a shortage.29 Casaubon, however, does not look upon the oracles with disbelief. He assumes that they are under some form of spiritual illumination, but the key issue involves the kind of spirit influencing the oracles. On that topic, Casaubon is circumspect in assigning positive connotations. Indeed, evidence points in the direction of the demonic: the oracles appear to have no concept of their own rhetoric. This fact provides the strongest clue for Casaubon that something other than the faculty of reason controls the ancient prognosticators, who had “strange sights and visions, which for the time did alienate the mind of the beholder.” In other words, the oracles get carried away in frenzy, or what Casaubon describes elsewhere as “furor Corybanticus.”31 This frenzy suggests that the oracles are possessed by demons who conspire with them to persuade the future, recalling however indirectly Augustine’s description of nefarious divination in the second book of On Christian Doctrine.32 Faux rhetorical fervor is a different matter, but it relates to the topic of demonic ardor. Cunning men and women who merely perform divine illumination function as instruments of the Devil, wittingly or unwittingly. One can recognize such pretended spiritual inspiration, Casaubon argues, because cunning orators usually lack a depth of knowledge and always lack a depth of conviction about the ideas they articulate. They pretend toward inspiration, as mounte28. Ibid., A3v. 29. Ibid., 19–20. 30. Ibid., 19. 31. Ibid., 9. 32. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 34–78.

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banks do. Ultimately, however, they use their natural ardor to deceive superstitious audiences who are not trained in the dual procedures of new philosophy and Anglican rhetoric. Casaubon points to the sophists as the best examples of this type of cunning rhetoric in ancient literature, using Gorgias as the primary illustration.33 He acknowledges Gorgias’s craft (e.g., strategic delivery, careful arrangement), and so he does not raise the possibility of overt demonic possession. At the same time, Gorgias sets aside the hard questions of truth for the sake of momentary stylistic pleasure, making sophistry a form of hedonism in Casaubon’s mind, especially given the sophist’s infernal desire to please audiences more than to communicate truth. As evidence for his argument, Casaubon presents the image of Nero, who enjoyed eloquent speeches about virtue after dinner, despite his destructive behavior before dinner. Transported by the rare conceits of Roman sophistry, Nero easily dismissed the virtue of such speeches, which did not accentuate the moral of the story, but rather focused upon the music of the language.34 Sophistry works like this, Casaubon explains, manipulating natural ardor at the expense of reason, performing sound and fury signifying nothing. Perhaps Nero also stands in for Cromwell in this instance, much like the king of Moscovia recalls elements of Cromwellianism. Or, perhaps Casaubon uses Nero to make an allegorical argument against the more radical elements of nonconformist enthusiasm, which he sees as full of rhetorical fire but empty of rhetorical virtue. The latter and more general thesis seems clear, but the question of Cromwell remains complicated. After all, Cromwell asked Casaubon to write a factual history of the Puritan revolt. Casaubon’s tendency toward quiet contemplation, rather than vitriolic attack, would have gone a long way toward giving this history a mood that someone like Milton could not achieve, and a mood distinguishable from the predictably 33. Casaubon, Treatise Concerning Enthusiasm, 206–7. Note also Casaubon’s appeal to “Cresollius,” a Catholic priest who “hath taken great pains upon that subject, in a book entitled Theatrum Veterum Rhetorum, &c., printed at Paris, 1620, wherein he doth prosecute that argument of the sophists, and all things belonging unto them” (207). 34. Ibid., 220–22.

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acrid tones of Clarendon’s and Burnet’s Anglican histories of the Interregnum. In the end, however, Casaubon declined Cromwell’s offer, probably wisely, and instead produced the Treatise, which is another kind of Interregnum history entirely.

Casaubon’s New Experimentalism Casaubon examines rhetorical enthusiasm through the precepts of new philosophy. He starts with the idea that one must have a “true knowledge” of “causes and effects” in order to distinguish between natural and preternatural cases of rhetoric.35 Because Casaubon describes certain seemingly fantastical cases as natural (e.g., “melancholici, maniaci, estatici, phrenetici,” and “hystericae”), he sometimes suffers the reputation as a forerunner to modern skepticism—a figure associated with Pierre Bayle and David Hume.36 This characterization is inaccurate. Casaubon’s primary aim is to produce in Anglicans an even stronger belief in the world of spirits, including the activities of angels, devils, and witches, by clearly demarcating genuinely preternatural rhetoric from other types of natural enthusiasm. “Here no question is made of Enthusiastic Divination, either divine or diabolical,” Casaubon insists, adding that he should “not be suspected by any to question the truth and reality of supernaturall [causes],” which have both “the authority of the Holy Scriptures” and the authority of “sound reason.”37 By framing the issue of rhetorical enthusiasm in terms of causes and effects, Casaubon obviously increases the power of the new scientist to make judgments in spiritual matters, which leads to hazardous consequences that Casaubon probably did not anticipate, as Enlightenment science drifted farther away from the spiritual world. He most clearly expresses confidence in science in the chapter upon rhetorical enthusiasm: “Let others admire Witches and Magicians, as much as they will,” but “good Physician[s]” and good “philosophers” deserve “much more” admiration, “who can (as Gods instrument)” teach and heal the mind through “the knowledge 35. Ibid., 215. 37. Ibid., 36, 80.

36. Ibid., 36.

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of nature,” that is, the knowledge of causes and effects.38 Casaubon’s argument comes at the expense of nonconformists who privilege revelatory rhetoric over rationalism, or right reason over experimentalism. And it also comes at the expense of other “Jesuits,” “Lutherans,” and “Calvinists” who subscribe to the “Method” of “mystical Theologie.”39 In Casaubon’s mind, these philosophers revere “fierie Meteors, & other apparitions of the Air” more than the “Sun,” which is another way of contrasting his own neoclassicism against the idioms of continental mysticism.40 Casaubon’s arguments do not come at the expense of the Anglican latitudinarians, who concur with his methods almost completely. Casaubon’s constant reference to classical philosophy and rhetoric, scant reference to experiment, and Latinate discursiveness may give readers an entirely different impression of the Treatise. Korshin, for example, argues that the classical allusions make the book feel dated. Most of “Casaubon’s examples are anything but contemporary,” he observes, suggesting further that in an effort to maintain an “apolitical attitude” Casaubon prevents a “completely current” study of enthusiasm by using old illustrations.41 Korshin consequently places Casaubon’s text in the same category as Browne’s Pseudodoxia epidemica (1646)—not a compliment in the world of new science. It is a mistake, however, to put these two books in the same antiquated tradition. Despite the old-fashioned examples in the Treatise, Casaubon delivers his arguments with a modern philosophical purpose and force. Specifically, he treats the examples from classical literature as scientific case studies. The classical examples stand in for occult phenomena that occur in every age, including and perhaps most importantly the Interregnum. When Casaubon argues against Minos’s mystical monarchy, for instance, he simultaneously invokes contemporary conceptions of mystical authority. Casaubon simply uses indirection in order to sidestep undesirable intrigue. His clas38. Ibid., 171. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Paul Korshin, “Introduction,” Treatise Concerning Enthusiasm, xix. See also Korshin, “Figural Change and the Survival of Tradition in the Later Seventeenth Century,” in Studies in Change and Revolution: Aspects of English Intellectual History, 1640–1800, ed. Paul Korshin (Yorkshire: Scolar Press, 1972), 99–128.

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sical examples nonetheless function as precise analogues, speaking to the latest controversies among occult philosophers, preternatural charmers, and experimentalists. The outcome is a discussion structured less like Pseudodoxia epidemica and more like Sadducismus triumphatus, where Glanvill also critiques various instances of the paranormal—acknowledging some as supernatural and describing others as natural. The difference is that Glanvill draws his illustrations from contemporary possession narratives and witchcraft testimonies. Writing twenty years before Glanvill and in a different theological climate, Casaubon understandably chooses another and more indirect kind of evidence. The fact remains, however, that Casaubon comments thoroughly upon his era’s controversies, assuming that his readers are willing to read between the lines. In the opening chapter of The Advancement of Learning, Bacon sets the standard for Casaubon’s strategy of using classical illustrations to make modern philosophical arguments. Of particular interest is Bacon’s reference to Pygmalion’s frenzy. He uses the mythical image to show how zealous mystics of his own era suffer from an imagination that overthrows the judgment for the bad moving of the will.42 The story of Pygmalion becomes in the Baconian worldview an emblem for superstitious rhetorical behavior broadly conceived. In a similar way, Casaubon uses classical illustrations throughout the Treatise, highlighting the experimental attitude toward natural and supernatural eloquence. Once we perceive Casaubon’s classical examples in this Baconian light, the Treatise’s seemingly antiquated nature dissipates almost entirely. Casaubon’s dictum to “let others admire witches and magicians” also speaks to an argument in the Treatise against Plato, who appears as a magician of sorts—or even a witch. Plato suffers from enthusiastic impulses, Casaubon contends: “Plato in his Phaedrus ..... disputes that divine madnesse is to be preferred before human sobriety and wisdome.”43 Not surprisingly, this mystical tendency puts Plato at odds with the new rationalism, as Casaubon shapes this rational42. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, 52. 43. Casaubon, Treatise Concerning Enthusiasm, 34.

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ism, which eventually causes him to call Plato a mystical poet, a candidate to be ousted from the Republic: “we admire Plato, as a philosopher: but they that read him with the same judgment, as many Ancients did, will find that it is his Poetry, that he professeth not, that is admired, more than that Philosophy, that he professeth.”44 Specifically, Plato’s furor in the Phaedrus creates too much of a hurdle for Casaubon’s proto-Enlightenment temperament to overcome. Contrarily, Aristotle appears as a better model for new philosophers: “no man need to read any other than Aristotle” on the matter of “Eloquence.”45 This is epideictic rhetoric touched by hyperbole, but even so, it is praise earned by the down-to-earth Aristotle, due to his less than numinous rhetorical sensibility. Casaubon finds Aristotle’s nominalism and rationalism more attractive than Plato’s mysticism, which makes Aristotle a more appropriate candidate for emulation among latitudinarian thinkers. At the same time, when approaching late seventeenth-century assessments of the ancient world, one should always keep in mind Dryden’s remark about classical learning. For Dryden, new philosophers have advanced beyond “all of those credulous and doting ages from Aristotle to us.”46 Casaubon shares this sentiment entirely. He is a modern classicist, not an antiquarian. As a presupposition underlying all of his remarks about rhetoric, Casaubon advances a clear split between words and things, recalling Bacon’s distinction in The Advancement. “The reality of the thing ..... is our businesse,” Casaubon explains, adding that “neither here do we hold bare similitudes a sufficient ground,” even though “divers Authors” use “them to set out the excellent beauty and amiableness of an eloquent piece.”47 In the typical fashion of the new philosophy, Casaubon separates language from reality, creating what T. S. Eliot famously called “the dissociation of sensibility.” Reducing tropes to the status of adornment in the Treatise, Casaubon sounds very much like all of the other experimentalists who reject the veri44. Ibid., 271. 45. Ibid., 238. 46. Dryden, The Essays of John Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker (2 vols.; New York: Russell and Russell, 1961), vol. 1, 165. 47. Casaubon, Treatise Concerning Enthusiasm, 238.

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similitudes of the occult rhetorical cosmos: “Figures of Speech” are not a “sufficient ground” for knowledge, he insists, because they privilege similitudes over the prized faculty of reason.48 Casaubon treats rhetorical style as a dress for content, rather than the entelechial completion of content, or rather than the mystical architectonic of the universe, as in the case of Thomas Browne’s epiphany about the macrocosm to microcosm trope: Browne finds “real truth therein.”49 Emphasizing universal reason and rhetorical perspicuity at the expense of occult philosophy, Casaubon prepares the way for the Royal Society’s language reforms. More broadly, he anticipates Enlightenment philosophy and rhetoric, which culminates in George Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776), a text that has both the rigor and the limits of the Enlightenment science of rhetoric. Relentless in its compartmentalized vision of the human mind, including the tropes embedded therein, Campbell’s book nonetheless lacks an ambitious accommodation of all things dappled and sublime. A world that apotheosizes human rationality in the absence of mystery, revelation, and wonderment is a diminished one. Consequently, even edifying mystical rhetoric appears as a dangerous form of language in the minds of many Enlightenment critics, who subsequently expel enchanted rhetoric from the commonwealth, conceptualizing it as an obvious extension of the enthusiasm that marked seventeenth-century religious tumult.

Interregnum Turmoil Korshin argues that Casaubon remains mostly neutral and detached from the milieu of Interregnum controversy.50 He even suggests that the Treatise could be taken as a mild defense of the moderate nonconformity that Cromwell advances against more radical manifestations of separatist thought (e.g., Ranters, Quakers, Diggers, Seekers). I find evidence to the contrary, though I accept Korshin’s point that the book is not the work of a controversialist. Casaubon 48. Ibid. 49. Browne, Religio Medici, 64. 50. Korshin, “Introduction,” Treatise Concerning Enthusiasm, xvii–xix.

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writes the opposite of a polemic. By doing so, he saves Cromwell’s regime from any sort of direct embarrassment, but this is not to suggest that he remains above the fray. He simply treads carefully, making implicit arguments against claims of illumination that pervade nonconformist discourses. For example, he critiques Anabaptist impulses in his chapter on philosophical enthusiasm, calling into question the “Anabaptisticall times” of the present age, where the “estaticall” circumvents the logical.51 While he does not single out particular Anabaptists for censure (e.g., Felix Manz, Conrad Grebel, Jacob Hutter, Richard Overton), he notes that the movement in general suffers from an abundance of ardor at the expense of rationality. That is, he places most instances of such nonconformity in the category of enthusiasm. This critique of Anabaptism strikes close to the heart of Puritan rhetoric, but Casaubon stops short of directly criticizing the English Puritans. Perhaps he feared reprisals from Cromwell’s government. Or, perhaps he felt that the implication was sufficiently clear already. Both possibilities are likely. Also, as a true believer in cases of inspiration, and as an English citizen interested in peace, Casaubon would have seen little advantage in scrutinizing Puritan illumination in an effort to sort out real from false inspiration. His reference to Anabaptism already accomplishes the purpose of the book: to call for analysis of all claims of inspired rhetoric, continental and English. Upon the Restoration, as a result of his arguments in the Treatise, Casaubon received great affection from Anglicans, indicating that most Anglican readers understood his implied thesis against nonconformist excesses. This thesis, however, remains complex. I have no doubt that Casaubon perceived Cromwell to be a sincere man of God and a truly gifted orator. Similarly, he believed the magician John Dee to be a man of God and a master of the art of prayer. But in the case of Dee’s philosophy, as Casaubon argues in the preface to Dee’s spiritual diary, demons took advantage of the magician, ultimately corrupting his eloquence.52 Casaubon implicitly makes the 51. Casaubon, Treatise Concerning Enthusiasm, 85–86. 52. Casaubon, ed., A True and Faithful Relation, Preface.

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same argument against radical Cromwellian rhetoric, which operates in the Treatise as a form of sincere eloquence turned diabolically enthusiastic, consequently moving all of England in a destructive direction. “Teutonick Chimericall extravagancies” also come under suspicion in the Treatise.53 Of most significance, Casaubon targets “Jac. Behmius”—describing him as a “mere fanatick” and progenitor of rhetorical “frenzies.”54 By repudiating the convivial mystic’s rhetoric, Casaubon once more takes an active part in the intellectual life of the era, and a decidedly Anglican part.55 Boehme’s pietism complemented nonconformist mysticism, primarily because he emphasized direct and personal illumination from God. The fact that Boehme was a craftsman turned philosopher also helped matters. He epitomized the evangelical idea of the self-proclaimed preacher, a man who forgoes formal rhetorical training and achieves eloquence directly from the Holy Spirit, or what Milton describes in a different context as “prompt eloquence” (Paradise Lost, V.149). Boehme functions in the Treatise as a metonym for these nonconformist ideas, which Casaubon summarily rejects. And while the main target is Boehme, Casaubon—we might easily conjecture—also censures Rosicrucian philosophy with the phrase “Teutonick Chimericall extravagancies.” Like Jacob Boehme’s occult treatises, the Rosicrucian Fama and Confessio (1652) achieved immediate notoriety in the Interregnum, to the delight of nonconformist mystics (e.g., William Lilly, John Webster), and to the dismay of Anglican philosophers, for example, Bishop Wilkins, Seth Ward, and the older Glanvill. By casting aspersions upon Teutonic occultism, Casaubon sets a clear taxonomical standard for what counts as contemplative enthusiasm. He warns readers against continental magic and 53. Casaubon, Treatise Concerning Enthusiasm, 167. 54. Ibid. 55. Yates, Rosicrucian Enlightenment, 99. On Boehme’s mysticism and the English Interregnum, see Spiller, Meric Casaubon and the Royal Society, 105–19. See also B. J. Gibbons, Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought: Behmenism and Its Development in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 185–225.

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mysticism, or what Samuel Parker similarly describes as the “ungrounded and fanatick fancy” of the “Society of the Rosie Cross,” which “poison[s] mens minds, and dispose[s] them to the wildest and most Enthusiasticke fanaticisme.”56 Casaubon chooses sides in the controversies of the day, though the side he takes is not always clearly demarcated by the expected binary of conformist and nonconformist thought. For instance, while Anglican and Royalist in temperament, Casaubon seems wholeheartedly relieved by Cromwell’s rejection of mystical monarchy. In fact, we discover in the Treatise an ambitious argument against reinstituting mystical government: “the opinion of divine inspiration ..... hath ever been one of the main crafts & mysteries of government, which the best of heathens sometimes (as well as the worst, more frequently) ..... have been glad to use.”57 As examples of mystical monarchies gone awry, Casaubon cites Minos, Theseus, and Lycurgus—all enthusiastic “founders of Common Weales” who used “holy pretensions” to make the public pliable and obedient.58 “To more discerning eyes,” Casaubon suggests, such ideas of governance are grounded “upon very little probability.”59 The mystical kingcraft of England is certainly a crucial (though implicit) part of Casaubon’s critique, but philosophers of rhetoric should also perceive in his criticisms a rejection of the Pope. The verisimilitude between mystical kingcraft and papistry troubled the experimentally minded Anglicans, who consequently repudiated the Pope’s mystical status for the same reason that they (quietly) repudiated the king’s mystical status. Of course, Casaubon’s rejection of mystical politics also applies to those writers who perceive an “active star” in Cromwell’s reign, to use Marvell’s astrological reference (“An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland” 1.12). The same problematic supernaturalism that informed concepts of mystical monarchy also informed separatist notions of enchanted rule—often motivated by judicial astrology. The alternative was a government 56. Parker, A Free and Impartial Censure of the Platonic Philosophy, 73. 57. Casaubon, Treatise Concerning Enthusiasm, 4. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid.

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grounded upon natural reason, which was precisely the framework adopted by subsequent Anglican philosophers (e.g., Locke), who moved in the direction of realism. And while nearly all of the late seventeenth-century experimentalists were deeply religious thinkers, their somewhat benign embrace of vulgar realism in the political arena created an opportunity for the not-so-benign secular realisms of the eighteenth century, as expressed most cogently in Hume and Gibbon, where the supernatural has no place whatsoever in the concept of governance. Finally, strangely, Casaubon claims to say relatively little on the topic of religious controversy. Early in the Treatise, he announces an intention to avoid the topic of religious enthusiasm entirely: “Of Religious Enthusiasm, truly and really religious, there is nothing to be found here.”60 One should read this remark as a moment of indirection, or paralepsis, in which Casaubon talks about religious enthusiasm by claiming not to talk about it. He acts circuitously in order to protect his analysis from counterattacks by separatists, who may very well recognize their own rhetorical practices as enthusiastic, by Casaubon’s standards. Rather than confronting separatist rhetoric straightforwardly, Casaubon chooses a more subtle approach. In at least one important sense, however, his entire book is about religious enthusiasm. Religion operates at the very center of Interregnum controversy, and this includes rhetorical controversy.61 Religious disagreements provide the deepest motive for nearly every serious argument in the period. Nonetheless, Casaubon pretends to sidestep the issue, which serves well his genuinely non-reactionary temperament.

Conclusion: Demonology, Rhetoric, and Science The Treatise’s conclusion is at once odd and revealing. Casaubon relates a story about a man shot by an arrow. The man subsequently gains divinatory and precatory powers.62 Through prayer the man 60. Ibid., 24. 61. On Interregnum religion and politics, see John Spurr, The Post-Reformation: Religion, Politics and Society in Britain 1603–1714 (London: Pearson Longman, 2006), 118–44. 62. Casaubon, Treatise Concerning Enthusiasm, 294–97.

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heals, but even after recovering, he continues with an intense regimen of iterative praying, which ultimately causes him to become an ecstatic mystic. He predicts the future, including the place of his own death, and he interacts with strange spirits whom he perceives as benevolent. Casaubon doubts the benevolence of the spirits, though he does not doubt the narrative’s legitimacy. He takes the story to be accurate in its facts, but this does not explain why Casaubon tells it. The Treatise ends on a note of preternatural wonderment. The story in no way lends itself to natural explanations, and this is his overarching point. The mystical example challenges those who look only for mechanical explanations in the world. The narrative of the man shot by the arrow functions as a warning against the materialistic side of experimentalism, those scientists who would drain too much mystery from the cosmos (e.g., mechanical enthusiasts, sadducists, houyhnhnms). Casaubon expressed this concern over mechanical philosophy throughout his life, which kept him at a distance from the more utilitarian undercurrents of the Royal Society.63 The story also functions as a warning against mystical theology, because the example is by no means edifying, especially as the man continues down the path of esoterica. Indeed, Casaubon detects something diabolical in the prognosticator’s character, a suspicion that inspires him to recommend Nicholas Remy’s Demonolatry: “Let any man read the first, and the fourth Chapter of his third book of Demonolatry [in order] to judge whether there be not cause to suspect such addresses as are made unto Saints in such cases.”64 Casaubon presents this concluding example of enthusiasm as a case of positive religious prayer that slowly becomes demonic. Rather than regulating his religious temperament through the procedures of Anglican orthodoxy and new science, the man shot by the arrow opts instead for the mystical method.65 Throughout the Treatise, Casaubon associates this mystical method with the excesses of Anabaptist rhetoric, the “Chimericall fancy” of Teutonic rhetoric, or the false fire of Puritan rhetoric. These tendencies open writers to de63. See Spiller, Meric Casaubon and the Royal Society, 40–56. 64. Casaubon, Treatise Concerning Enthusiasm, 297. 65. Ibid.

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monic persuasions, Casaubon argues, and under such circumstances, Remy proves more helpful in diagnosing and curing the problem than rhetorical theorists such as Aristotle, Cicero, and Erasmus. Strikingly, the recommendation of Remy’s book is the final statement of the Treatise. Casaubon ends on a note of overt witchcraft, after spending most of his time discussing diabolical rhetorical enthusiasm either directly or indirectly. Sometimes it proves unhelpful to imagine all of the things a writer could have done, but did not. In this case, the opposite is true. Casaubon does not recommend Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, and neither does he recommend Bishop Wilkins’s A Discourse Concerning Prayer (1653), one of the most ambitious studies of prayer by an Anglican theologian in the seventeenth century. Also absent from the conclusion are mainstay Renaissance rhetorical texts, for example, Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique (1560) and Henry Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence (1588), both of which circulated throughout the seventeenth century. Rather, Remy’s Demonolatry appears, and it does so for an intriguing reason that many who study seventeenth-century rhetoric and science may not appreciate. Casaubon comprehends the central role of demonology in the rhetorical and scientific debates of the era. For genuine scientific insight into precatory enthusiasm, he insists that new philosophers take an interest in witchcraft and other related preternatural phenomena. Only with a clear concept of how demons influence discourses will experimentalists come to understand the more mysterious dimensions of enthusiastic rhetoric, which in turn promises more insight into divine and natural influences. Put differently, rhetorical theorists must also become informal demonologists. This is the provocative message of the Treatise’s unusual conclusion, a message with which most members of the Royal Society wholeheartedly agree. Casaubon foregrounds the importance of the rhetorical tradition in diagnosing Interregnum turmoil, specifically arguing that one’s rhetorical tendencies provide the clearest evidence of demonry or righteousness. The crucial caveat for philosophers of rhetoric is that style functions in this context as an ontological category, not a syntactical one. By espousing modern philosophical rhetoric and remeric Casaub on    167

jecting occult philosophies of rhetoric, Casaubon foreshadows the more famous arguments for stylistic reform made by Wilkins, Glanvill, and Sprat, all of whom target rhetorical witchery as the main cause of Interregnum strife. Too often, however, Casaubon’s Latinate syntax holds the reader at a distance, and perhaps this is why scholars rarely mention him alongside the more candid new philosophers. Casaubon is not easy on his readers. The Treatise suffers from what Ian Robinson describes as “the wander” of the late Renaissance prose writer.66 At the same time, Casaubon’s Latinate syntax obviously verifies the point that the seventeenth-century language reforms have little to do with sentence structures in and of themselves. He is a plain style advocate in the philosophical sense of “plainness,” which is by far the most significant sense in early modern rhetoric and science. Casaubon belongs in the company of the Restoration revolutionaries, those new philosophers who instituted the plain language reforms and fundamentally altered the nature of English eloquence.

Epilogue: Casaubon’s Preface to John Dee’s Spiritual Diary In his lengthy preface to A True and Faithful Relation (1659), Casaubon admonishes the great Elizabethan spell caster. More generally, he reproaches the occult Renaissance cosmos. By the time Casaubon published the preface to the spiritual diary, Dee had achieved a legendary status among magicians, most of whom placed him alongside Merlin, Ficino, Agrippa, and other great conjurers in the history of magic. Casaubon takes an entirely different view, to the delight of new experimentalists and to the disgruntlement of sorcerers. He describes Dee as a conjurer of demons, though his diagnosis is complex. Unlike the stinging censures of magicians that would come later in Glanvill’s Sadducismus triumphatus, Casaubon’s censure of Dee is gentle: “Dr. Dee, so good, so innocent, yea, so pious a man, and so sincere a Christian as by these papers (his delusion and the effects of it still excepted) ..... doth seem to have been ..... so rackt in 66. Robinson, Establishment of Modern English Prose, 105.

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his soul ..... by evil Spirits.”67 The infamous magician appears as a victim of delusion as much as a champion of heresy. Nonetheless, while attempting to gain secret knowledge of the universe, Dee succumbed to demonic influences, Casaubon argues, all the while believing that he communicated with angels, in what amounts to an episode of diabolical inversion. That is, Dee suffered a demonic ruse, causing him to write a “Work of Darkness”—the spiritual diary—disguised as a work of light.68 Casaubon frames Dee’s story as a morality tale, similar to the stories of Faustus and Macbeth, where evil spirits move willing participants down the primrose path of despair. And, to most Interregnum scientists, Casaubon’s diagnosis proved utterly convincing. Dee’s story took its place alongside other tales of sorcery and demonic possession that captivated the seventeenth-century scientific imagination. Most important for philosophers of rhetoric, Casaubon identifies demonry in Dee’s magical language, though he acknowledges that Dee had the gift of prayer: But of his Praying too, somewhat would be observed. His Spirits tell him somewhere, that he had the Gift of Praying. Truly I believe he had, as it is ordinarily called: that it is, that he could express himself very fluently and earnestly in Prayer, and that he did it often to his own great contentment. Let no man wonder at this.69

At the same time, as Casaubon reports, Dee “abused” this gift by taking an unnatural interest in “Magical Circles, Characters, and 67. Casaubon, ed., A True and Faithful Relation, Preface. On Dee’s occult philosophy, see Nicholas H. Clulee, John Dee’s Natural Philosophy: Between Science and Religion (New York: Routledge, 1989); Clulee, “John Dee’s Archemastrie,” in Occult and Scientific Mentalities, 57–71; Peter French, John Dee: The World of the Elizabethan Magus (New York: Routledge, 1972). See also Gyorgy Szonyi’s John Dee’s Occultism: Magical Exaltation Through Powerful Signs (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005); Benjamin Woolley, The Queen’s Conjuror: The Science and Magic of Dr. John Dee (New York: Henry Holt, 2001); Deborah Harkness, John Dee’s Conversations with Angels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). On Casaubon and Dee, see Stephen Clucas, “Enthusiasm and ‘damnable curiosity’: Meric Casaubon and John Dee,” in Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. Robert John Weston Evans and Alexander Marr (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 131–48. 68. Casaubon, ed., A True and Faithful Relation, Preface. 69. Ibid.

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Invocations,” which lead to “Spiritual delusion.”70 Casaubon reveals Dee’s condition as that of a person yielding to demonic pressure, where Dee loses control of his own imagination to the same degree that demons gain control of it. Specifically, Dee’s unorthodox application of prayer signals bewitchment, rather than his use of particular types of sentence structures, kinds of tropes, and so forth. Casaubon, in other words, takes very little interest in Dee’s syntax, revealing once again the unmistakably ontological nature of the period’s rhetorical controversies. In a second and related statement against magical rhetoric, Casaubon also rejects Dee’s use of prelapsarian signatures, which many Renaissance magicians claimed to employ in their spells. Occult philosophers at the time perceived Dee’s magical writing as evidence of an Edenic discourse that still existed in the babble of the modern world, but had only been rediscovered and kept safe by a few magicians, for fear that such rhetorical power could cause great harm if exercised in the wrong hands. Casaubon, however, questions the legitimacy of Dee’s prelapsarian words and figures. He traces them not to the philological Ursprung at the beginning of the world, but rather to “Theseus Ambrosus,” a medieval magician who apparently invented several of the characters: “Yea, those very Characters commended unto Dr. Dee by his Spirits for holy, and mystical, and the original Characters (as I take it) of the holy tongue, they are no other, for the most part but such as were set out and published long ago by one Theseus Ambrosus out of Magical books.”71 Casaubon then displays these magical characters in a table at the end of the preface. Using this compelling evidence, Casaubon challenges those magicians who predicate their charming practices upon Dee’s understanding of Edenic discourse. He does not eliminate the possibility of prelapsarian rhetoric, but he certainly impugns Dee’s explanation of it. Additional evidence that Dee engaged in something other than proper Christian rhetoric includes the regular appearance of magical objects and inscriptions during his conjurations. Among the accou70. Ibid.

71. Ibid.

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trements are scrying stones, a magical curtain, strange powder, and various items of magical furniture, including charmed candlesticks and an oddly shaped table marked with the symbols of the Enochian alphabet.72 Such objects clearly function outside of orthodox Christian environments, and this fact alone raises the concern of white witchcraft. One stone, Dee’s “Angelicall Stone,” plays an especially important role.73 While wielding it, Dee claims to communicate with Raphael, questioning the angel in one episode about money owed by a nobleman.74 In an odd way, Dee’s discussion with Raphael foreshadows Adam’s questioning of Raphael in book 8 of Paradise Lost, though Dee’s interaction involves a trivial matter of commerce, not a significant matter of cosmology. (Perhaps one of Milton’s reasons for using Raphael as a character was to correct Dee’s questionable representation.) By the standards of Anglican new philosophy, accoutrements such as scrying stones and magical charms appear as extensions of either idolatry or overt witchcraft, two manifestations of the same demonic impulse toward the veneration of relics. This is an apostasy of the worst kind, because it substitutes for the worship of God the worship of false images, or what Bacon calls “idols of the mind” (e.g., verbal charms), a transgression of the first commandment. In order to debunk the magical aura surrounding such items, Casaubon experiments upon them, concluding that the objects themselves have no unusual properties. Still, he clearly believes that the objects played a crucial role in Dee’s conjurations, but for him the role is one of watchword—a rhetorical signal for demons to accomplish preternatural feats.75 This is how Casaubon explains Dee’s effective magic, and it is also how he explains the effective magic of Edward Kelley, the man who accompanied Dee during many of his incantations. E.K. remains an enigmatic figure in the story of Dee’s magic. Casaubon attaches a postscript to the preface of the diary where he comments upon Kelley’s less than positive influence on Dee. Casau72. Ibid. 73. Ibid. 74. Dee, A True and Faithful Relation, 77, 195. 75. Casaubon, ed., A True and Faithful Relation, Preface.

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bon relates a story recounted by a reliable witness in Lancashire, a man who watched Kelley unearth a recently deceased person, perform subsequent incantations, and then communicate with the person (or body) in question.76 This particularly distasteful act of necromancy brings readers farther down the road of diabolical magic than anything Dee produced. Why does Casaubon share the tale? Using the illustration, he makes an effective guilt-by-association argument, where Kelley casts a dark shadow upon Dee’s character. In short, he tells the story of Kelley’s necromancy to show not only that nefarious witchcraft was real, but also that it occurred near Dee, and probably with his consent. In a prefatory “Apology” in the diary, Dee defends his magic against charges of diabolical sorcery, holding firm to the commonplace Renaissance distinction between Christian magic and demonic sorcery. “I have used and still use, good, lawfull, honest, Christian and divinely prescribed means,” Dee insists, distancing himself from the “utterly false reports and slanders” of those who accuse him of witchcraft.77 Predictably, Dee’s apology met with little success. Most new philosophers in the Restoration did not recognize the difference between proper and improper magic (i.e., angelic and demonic magic), but rather perceived all sorcery to be diabolical in nature. Webster’s subsequent and infamous apology for Dee in the late seventeenth century met with even less success, if that is possible. In the Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (1677), Webster comes to Dee’s defense, characterizing him as a natural magician, a practicing Christian, and a practiced astrologer. Specifically, Webster emphasizes Dee’s Christian astrology, an argument designed to connect Dee and William Lilly, the most prominent nonconformist astrologer of the Interregnum. Webster also lambastes Casaubon, accusing him of practicing literary necromancy by digging up Dee’s bones in order to charge him with craven deeds, a clever ad hominem argument, but one that gains little traction.78 The most interesting aspect of Webster’s disputation arrives in the final chapter, 76. Ibid., Postscript. 77. Dee, A True and Faithful Relation, Apology. 78. Webster, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (London, 1677), 8.

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however, where he defends the viability of Dee’s natural language magic, sounding very much like a Rosicrucian astrologer in the process. If “fit and agreeable ..... words or characters” can be “joined together, when the heavens are in a convenient site or configuration for the purpose intended, those words and characters will receive a most powerful virtue, for the purpose intended, and will effectually operate to those ends by a just, lawful, and natural agency.”79 Like many writers sympathetic to the idea of natural magic, Webster relies upon astrology in order to justify his view of charming. Thus, when astrology collapsed in the intellectual circles of the Restoration, Webster’s arguments also collapsed, as did all arguments built upon the notion that words and charms might be imbued with the natural powers of the stars, planets, and constellations.80 By the time Webster entered into the debate with Casaubon, it was too late to rescue Dee’s status. Yates even laments that “[Casaubon’s critique] ruined Dee’s reputation and deprived him for centuries of the credit for his important scientific work,” but this is a slight overstatement.81 Dee’s reputation was in jeopardy long before Casaubon got involved. Casaubon nonetheless rightly positioned Dee in opposition to the advancement of modern experimentalism. Moreover, he predicated the contrast in large part upon the incommensurability between Dee’s magical rhetoric and the new experimentalist’s plain rhetoric, rightly placing the rhetorical tradition at the center of the dispute between magic and science in seventeenthcentury England. 79. Ibid., 341. 80. Earlier in the century, and for similar reasons, the skeptic of astrology Marin Mersenne rejects Ficino’s magical rhetoric in De vita coelitus comparanda (1489): “That any influences whatever have been brought down from the stars” by “incantations,” “singing,” or other magical-rhetorical procedures “has been entirely repudiated” (Questiones in genesim [Paris, 1623], 1705). 81. Yates, Rosicrucian Enlightenment, 188.

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Chapter 6

John Dryden, New Ph il os ophy, and Rhetoric

)( John Dryden’s criticism belongs to the rhetorical tradition. He is a philosopher of rhetoric and a rhetorical critic of literature, insofar as he expresses his views in the prefaces and essays. Most notably, Dryden— setting out to refine English eloquence—distinguishes between occult and plain tropes, which makes his work an especially useful case study, one that further substantiates the philosophical nature of the period’s language reforms. Magical conceits and charmed paronomasias become for Dryden indicators of a superstitious worldview. In contrast to such enchanted linguistic practices, he substitutes the plain tropes of learning’s advancement, all in an effort to improve the English language and by extension the English way of life. In short, Dryden attempts nothing less than a tropological reformation of English eloquence. He follows Bacon’s arguments against occult rhetoric in The Advancement of Learning and works in conjunction with Sprat’s arguments against rhetorical bewitchment in The History of the Royal Society. 174

Using the canon of style, in particular, Dryden rejects the idioms of Renaissance magic and mystery, promulgates Restoration perspicuity, and, as most members of the Royal Society desired (even delinquent members like Dryden), revolutionizes English rhetoric.

The Tropes of Credulous and Doting Ages Dryden’s optimism about language refinement pervades his writings, but the most concise expressions of the idea appear in Of Dramatic Poesy (1668) and Defense of the Epilogue (1672). In the latter, Dryden sets out to show “that our language is much improved, and that [contemporary readers] have not a just value for the age in which they live.”1 He recalls Glanvill’s like-minded claim in The Vanity of Dogmatizing: “We look with a superstitious Reverence upon the accounts of the past Ages, and with a supercilious Severity on the most deserving products of our own.”2 By way of illustrating the point, Dryden cites examples from Renaissance literature. Specifically, he discusses the problem of linguistic sensibility in some of the early seventeenth-century dramas, suggesting that writers of the present era have transcended the rhetorical barbarisms of previous generations: “Let any man who understands English read the works of Shakespeare and Fletcher, and I dare undertake that he will find in every page either some solecism in speech, or some notorious flaw in sense.”3 He makes this point as a technical rhetorician and grammarian. If it holds, then it holds in the context of Restoration aesthetics, especially the Restoration critique of wonderment and sublimity, of which Shakespeare in particular is not lacking. Philosophers of rhetoric must go to Of Dramatic Poesy, however, to discover the deeper rationale supporting Dryden’s conviction. Much like Sprat and Glanvill, Dryden apprehends in the Restoration an advancement of learning in every discipline. The source of this enlightenment is the new experimentalism and, by extension, the plain philosophy of language contained therein: 1. Dryden, The Essays of John Dryden, vol. 1, 164. 2. Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing, 25. 3. Dryden, The Essays of John Dryden, 165.

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Is it not evident, in these last hundred years (when the study of philosophy has been the business of all the Virtuosi in Christendom), that almost a new Nature has been revealed to us?—That more errors of the school have been detected, more useful experiments in philosophy have been made, more noble secrets in optics, medicine, anatomy, astronomy, discovered, than in all those credulous and doting ages from Aristotle to us?—So true it is that nothing spreads more fast than science, when rightly and generally cultivated.4

The phrase “all those credulous and doting ages from Aristotle to us” says much about Dryden’s attitude toward classical and Renaissance learning. He respects certain elements of the classical tradition, but he balances this respect against scientific advancements, which reveal the barbaric nature of the ancient world. Dryden consequently sets out to repudiate the superstitions of the past, foreshadowing Samuel Johnson’s similar attitude toward the world that produced ancient knowledge, including ancient rhetorical theory. Replying to Mrs. Thrale’s inquiry, “What of Demosthenes saying, action, action, action,” Johnson famously declares, “Demosthenes, Madam, spoke to an assembly of brutes; to a barbarous people.”5 These are Dryden’s sentiments exactly. He is a modern classicist. A member of the Royal Society for five years, Dryden served on the committee for the improvement of the English language.6 He attended scientific experiments and lectures, though he was less consistent in the matter of paying membership fees. Among other ideas, he instituted the now common rule that a sentence should not end with a preposition. Dryden also supported the push for rhetorical plainness. Like most writers associated with the Royal Society, he perceived plainness as a counterstatement to the credulous rhetoric of old epochs. Francis Bacon had already begun to reformulate 4. Ibid., 37. 5. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (London: Everyman, 1993), 452–53. 6. On Dryden and the Royal Society, see James Anderson Winn, Dryden and his World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), 128–36; Phillip Harth, Contexts of Dryden’s Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 9–19; Louis Bredvold, The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden: Studies in Some Aspects of Seventeenth-Century Thought (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1934), 47–72; Claude Lloyd, “John Dryden and the Royal Society,” PMLA 45 (1930): 967–76.

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the nature of rhetorical style in his Advancement of Learning, and this reformulation takes a major step forward in Dryden. As one practical application of the new rhetorical sensibility, Dryden and William Davenant “translate” Shakespeare’s Tempest into the language of the modern paradigm.7 In this adaptation, one catches a glimpse of just how different the Restoration rhetorical sensibility is. Take, for instance, Shakespeare’s passage, as spoken by Prospero to Miranda: Tis time I should inform thee farther. Lend thy hand And pluck my magic garment from me. So [Lays down his mantle]: Lie there, my art. Wipe thou thine eyes; have comfort. The direful spectacle of the wreck, which touch’d The very virtue of compassion in thee, I have with such provision in mine art So safely ordered that there is no soul— No, not so much perdition as an hair Betid to any creature in the vessel Which thou heard’st cry, which thou saw’st sink. Sit down; For thou must now know farther.                          (I.ii.22–33)

Dryden and Davenant reformulate the passage as such: I should inform thee farther: wipe thou thine Eyes, have comfort; the direful spectacle of the wrack, which touch’d the very virtue of compassion in thee, I have with such a pity safely order’d, that not one creature in the Ship is lost.

The attempt to improve upon Shakespeare’s work in this manner strikes some critics as patently absurd in retrospect, but for Dryden and his contemporaries, the revision of the coarse Shakespeare into a new and more austere Shakespeare was an act of highorder Englishness. It was also an act of new philosophy. While the 7. Dryden and Davenant, The Tempest (London, 1670). On new science in Dryden and Davenant’s adaptation, see Katharine Eisaman Maus, “Arcadia Lost,” in Critical Essays on John Dryden, ed. James Winn (New York: G. K. Hall, 1997), 73–88.

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grammatical logic behind Dryden and Davenant’s revisions is clear enough in this passage (i.e., to streamline Shakespeare’s syntax), the deeper philosophical motivation behind it may not be. But Dryden and Davenant provide one key clue. In reworking Prospero’s speech, they drop the “magic.” The magic garment disappears. Perhaps this can be accounted for in terms of superfluous verbiage, but I doubt it. By excluding magic, Dryden and Davenant perform not only a re-envisioning of Shakespeare’s text, but also a re-envisioning of Shakespeare’s world. The magic that proved central to Shakespeare’s cosmos gets subordinated, even erased in this instance, by a more enlightened retelling. This is not to say that Dryden and Davenant eliminate the numinous sensibility from Shakespeare, which would be impossible, but they do downplay it at every turn, to the degree that one loses the original Tempest’s feeling of enchantment. The play becomes in Dryden and Davenant’s 1670 retelling a far more efficient drama, even mechanical in certain respects. That intangible Shakespearean occultism is gone. Consequently, the revision takes on a kind of modern frigidity that even the coldest of Shakespeare’s characters would not recognize, because none of Shakespeare’s characters are written in the modern world, despite Harold Bloom’s argument to the contrary.8 For Dryden, this is an improvement, precisely because that intangible mysticism of the late Renaissance allows superstitious rhetoric to flourish. Dryden advances a similar argument against the Elizabethan rhetorical sensibility in his preface to Troilus and Cressida (1679), lumping Shakespeare and Aeschylus together in order to critique their shared esoteric tendencies: “the poet Aeschylus was held in the same veneration by the Athenians of after ages as Shakespeare is by us; and Longinus has judged, in favor of him, that he had a noble boldness of expression, and that his imaginations were lofty and heroic”; however, Dryden adds, “on the other side, Quintilian affirms that he was daring to extravagance.”9 By Dryden’s proto-Enlightenment standards, such extravagance is not a good thing.10 Agreeing with the imperturbable Quintilian and distancing himself from Longi8. Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead, 1998). 9. Dryden, The Essays of John Dryden, 202. 10. Ibid.

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nus and all things sublime, Dryden complains about Aeschylus’s and Shakespeare’s “affected pompous words,” which are also “obscured by figures.”11 His complaint, importantly, has nothing to do with the application of rhetoric in and of itself. Tropes are not at issue. Rhetorical obscurity is. Dryden worries about those mystical flights of fancy that he recalls through the negative reference to Longinus. In this case, he appeals to one aspect of classical rhetoric (Quintilian) in order to repudiate an occult dimension of both ancient and Renaissance sublimity—the rhetorical obscurity of Aeschylus and Shakespeare—revealing once more that the plain language advocates do not reject the rhetorical tradition. Neither, however, does Dryden endorse Quintilian in an unqualified way. He uses Quintilian in a utilitarian manner. In the final analysis, ancient orators belong to credulous and doting ages. Far from the world of antiquarianism, Dryden makes practical use of classical rhetoric, but there is an important caveat: Bacon’s and Descartes’s advancements of learning are also his.12 Dryden is a modern writer. Certain tendencies of ancient rhetoric pose no threat, especially those involving balance and propriety, if applied non-magically by civilized gentlemen. After explaining the value of Quintilian’s critique of figurative obscurity, Dryden laments the unregulated nature of the English language, which lacks a perfect grammar and a sound rhetoric: The English language is not capable of such a certainty [i.e., Quintilian’s sense of propriety]; and we are at present so far from it, that we are wanting in the very foundation of it, a perfect grammar. Yet it must be allowed to the present age, that the tongue in general is so much refined since Shakespeare’s time, that many of his words, and more of his phrases, are scarce intelligible. And of those which we understand, some are ungrammatical, others coarse; and his whole style is so pestered with figurative expressions, that it is as affected as it is obscure.13 11. Ibid. 12. On Dryden’s modern classicism, see Steven N. Zwicker, “Dryden and the Problem of Literary Modernity: Epilogue,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dryden, ed. Steven N. Zwicker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 280–85; Edward Pechter, Dryden’s Classical Theory of Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 13. Dryden, The Essays of John Dryden, 203.

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Dryden focuses upon Shakespeare’s mastery of figurative rhetoric, which he sees as a weakness, but not for the expected reason of courtly facade, and neither for its seeming alignment at times with the Erasmian ideal of copia rerum ac verborum. Rather, Shakespeare’s tropes lead to affectation and obscurity, and obscurity in particular carries an occult connotation in Dryden’s phrasing—the rust of an old-fashioned cosmos in decay. Dryden’s main target is the philosophical-rhetorical oddity of Shakespeare’s universe, as evidenced by his complaint about “scarcely intelligible phrases,” which are scarcely intelligible for reasons other than grammar and syntax, given his additional and separate complaint about ungrammatical phrases. What makes Shakespeare’s rhetoric unintelligible, if not grammar and syntax? The most cogent answer is Shakespeare’s world, but this may seem like no answer at all, or too much of an answer. For Dryden, the challenge of Shakespeare’s rhetoric goes far beyond grammatical issues. It is a challenge of worldview, a point he makes most cogently in the prologue to the adaptation of the Tempest: But Shakespeare’s Magick could not copy’d be, Within that Circle none durst walk but he.

This could easily serve as the prologue for all of Dryden’s comments upon Shakespeare. Though in one sense complimentary, Dryden recognizes the impenetrability of Shakespeare’s figurative cosmos (i.e., the way he figures the world), a place in many ways closed to the modern empiricist, who brings to the discussion an entirely different set of metaphysical, scientific, and rhetorical assumptions. Dryden recognizes in Shakespeare’s imaginative expressions the full force of an occult cosmos, and like other members of the Royal Society, he actively seeks to dispel such esoterica. The refining of the tongue that Dryden desires is a refining of Shakespeare’s ontological sensibility, where the enchanted tropes of Renaissance wonderment give way to the plain tropes of new science, or what Bacon described in a not-so-far-fetched fable as “The New Atlantis,” a road map both to the rise of experimentalism and to Swift’s spoof of it.

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Occult Ekphrasis Of all of Dryden’s comments upon rhetoric and poetics, the passage in the preface to Annus mirabilis (1666) is probably the most telling: “The composition of all poems is, or ought to be, of wit,” Dryden argues, by which he means the following: Tis not the jerk or sting of an epigram, nor the seeming contradiction of a poor antithesis (the delight of an ill-judging audience in a play of rhyme), nor the jingle of a more poor paronomasia: neither is it so much the morality of a grave sentence, affected by Lucan, but more sparingly used by Virgil; but it is some lively and apt description, dressed in such colors of speech, that it sets before your eyes the absent object, as perfectly, and more delightfully than nature.14

Philosophers discover in Dryden’s argument one of the best Restoration repudiations of the dominant early seventeenth-century rhetorical sensibility. And although the subject is poetry, one must not assume Dryden to be making a narrow comment here. Among other targets of critique, he certainly has in mind the sermons, essays, and orations of metaphysical writers like Andrewes and Donne, not to mention the plays of Shakespeare. The quasi-scientific writings of Browne also come to mind, as do the Rosicrucian books of the Interregnum and early Restoration. All of these texts make generous use of the rhetorical capacities that he calls into question: antithesis, epigram, paronomasia, and sublime description, or mystical ekphrasis. In fact, the pervasive use of antithesis defines an entire rhetorical epoch in English writing, beginning with the Reformation and culminating during the Civil War, where all sides of the controversies identify signs of Antichrist in their opponents, which is the ontological antithesis imbuing most Renaissance writing. Dryden responds to the Age of Antithesis in this critique. He describes the trope not as 14. Ibid., 14–15. On imagery and new science in Dryden, see George Watson, “Dryden and the Scientific Image,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 18 (1963): 25–35. On Dryden’s syntax, see K. G. Hamilton, “Dryden and Seventeenth-Century Prose Style,” in John Dryden, ed. Earl Miner (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1972), 297–324. See also Tina Skouen, “The Vocal Wit of John Dryden,” Rhetorica 24 (2006): 371–402.

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the central dynamic in the Augustinian, apocalyptic struggle between good and evil, and neither as the dominant figurative mode through which writers discover occult cosmic connections (e.g., metaphysical conceits). Rather, antithesis in its commonplace literary application causes some delight in ill-judging audiences. What a diminuendo! By diminishing the importance of antithesis, especially the ingenious conceit (the primary target), Dryden reveals once more a key aspect of his own strategy for mending the English language. He shifts figuration, abandoning the Augustinian and then Lutheran proclivity toward striking contrariety as a way of approaching the world, all the while embracing a version of proto-Enlightenment wit built upon a merely representational model of language: plain enargia. Dryden eschews the old figurative paradigms. In substitution, he elevates the importance of “apt description.” In this way, Dryden complements the Royal Society’s and the Port Royal’s experimental scientists, who also desire apt description as the most appropriate rhetorical mode for producing sound epistemology, forgoing the primacy of magical analogies and esoteric verisimilitudes, the rhetorical building blocks of the occult Renaissance cosmos. The best-known idea in Dryden’s preface to Annus mirabilis is his characterization of proper ekphrasis. Like all rhetorical strategies in the seventeenth century, ekphrasis is subject to the distinction between occult and plain manifestations. Dryden champions plain ekphrasis. He argues for a mode of “lively and apt description” that sets before the eyes an “absent object, as perfectly, and more delightfully than nature.” For Dryden, ekphrasis is a method of representation, where language plays the expected role of ornament. Ekphrasis is a linguistic event in the modern sense, functioning as mere image making, rather than sacred emblem making, spell casting, or enchantment (e.g., image as transport), which are other modes of ekphrasis common in Renaissance writing, especially among occult philosophers and mystics. Dryden ignores these esoteric possibilities, or, more precisely, he critiques them by ignoring them. For Dryden, description does not contain the essence of the thing described, nor does it constitute (or substantiate) the reality of the thing, as language functions in magical rhetoric. “To re182   dryden, new philosophy, & rhetoric

arrange words is to rearrange reality” in the world of occult rhetoric, as Vickers explains.15 To rearrange ekphrases is also to rearrange reality, and it is this enchanted idea of ekphrasis that most threatens the modern writer’s plain understanding of description. For an alternative to Dryden’s concept of proper ekphrasis, we should look to the sublime rhetoric of the metaphysicals. John Donne’s transportive conceits are useful examples, along with Richard Crashaw’s numinous verbal emblems. Take, for instance, Crashaw’s memorable description of Mary Magdalene’s eyes in The Weeper—the one to which so many critics have been unkind: And now where’er he strays Among the Galilean mountains, Or more unwelcome ways, He’s follow’d by two faithful fountains; Two walking baths, two weeping motions, Portable and compendious oceans.                (The Weeper, ll. 109–114)

Crashaw requires an inspired reader—what Milton calls the “fit audience”—to enter into the logic of the conceit, which is a logic of the heart. The audience is challenged to supply through enthymematic intuitions the missing information that explains the walking baths, assuming that Crashaw did not imagine a pair of bathtubs meandering about the countryside. What did he imagine? The awkwardness of a body carrying heavy pails of water is not unlike the inelegance that accompanies a body during times of deep sorrow. This shared physical awkwardness makes the conceit more intelligible. The image of the baths, though fragmentary, expresses the idea of cumbersome suffering. The baths also recall (however indirectly) the expansion of the Roman Empire, architecturally and architectonically, and the act of baptism in Christ, including Constantine’s conversion. The sympathetic reader must amplify relationships among elements in the conceit, and must infer connections. Readers who sense truth in the image are called to participate, 15. Vickers, “Analogy versus Identity,” 106.

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opening themselves, ourselves, to edifying possibilities, provided that the Spirit intervenes and makes possible the rhetorical communion—which is precisely the purpose of Crashaw’s ekphrastic arguments. The inspired reader must supply heartfelt exegesis, all the while calling upon the Spirit to supply revelatory furor, the same furor that moved the poet (furor poeticus). This mystical type of writing and reading is a world away from Dryden’s poetry of statement.16 Shakespeare provides one of the most memorable occult ekphrases in all of Renaissance literature, a description that also exists in a different rhetorical universe than Dryden’s. The porter’s scene in Macbeth looms in the middle of the tragedy as a mystical-ekphrastic portal to a preternatural state of affairs. Audiences in touch with Renaissance mysticism find themselves transported into the spiritual struggle between good and evil at the center of the play, and at the center of Shakespeare’s world. Macbeth’s evil genius, the porter, provides the transport through his cryptic description of the castle’s south gate, which operates simultaneously as hell’s mouth—literally and linguistically: Here’s a knocking indeed! If a man were porter of hell-gate, he should have old turning the key. [Knocking within] Knock, knock, knock! Who’s there, i’ the name of Beelzebub? Here’s a farmer, that hanged himself on the expectation of plenty: come in time; have napkins enow about you; here you’ll sweat for’t. [Knocking within] Knock, knock! Who’s there, in the other devil’s name? Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales 16. Furor poeticus literally means “poetical fury,” and the idea behind it in a Christian framework is that the Holy Spirit aids speakers in making their arguments, or, in pernicious cases, demons aid speakers. In either case, a spiritual force helps the writer to compose. Moreover, in this model, furor also touches the readers or listeners, a point seldom emphasized but nonetheless central to this sublime practice of rhetoric. Furor poeticus requires furor lectoris. Spirits aid readers in understanding inspired writing, as long as those readers participate sincerely in the discourse. On the origins of Christian furor poeticus, see A. C. Lloyd, “Greek Christian Platonism,” in The Cambridge History of Early Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, ed. A. H. Armstrong (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 425–31; Courtland Baker, “Certain Religious Elements in the English Doctrine of the Inspired Poet in the Renaissance,” English Literary History 6 (1939): 301. On rhetoric and furor poeticus, see Ryan J. Stark, “Paradise Lost as Incomplete Argument,” 1650–1850: Aesthetics, Ideas, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 16 (2009): forthcoming; Stark, “Some Aspects of Christian Mystical Rhetoric, Philosophy, and Poetry,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 41 (2008): 260–77.

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against either scale; who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven: O, come in, equivocator. [Knocking within] Knock, knock, knock! Who’s there? Faith, here’s an English tailor come hither, for stealing out of a French hose: come in, tailor; here you may roast your goose. [Knocking within] Knock, knock; never at quiet! What are you? But this place is too cold for hell. I’ll devil-porter it no further: I had thought to have let in some of all professions that go the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire. [Knocking within] Anon, anon! I pray you, remember the porter. (II.iii.1–19).

The porter’s ekphrasis transforms the image of the castle’s south gate, and the image of the castle itself by extension. Ekphrasis in this context does not merely represent reality. Rather, ekphrasis literally transports the audience into a different metaphysical awareness, a perception of fundamental evil. The audience finds itself confronted by a demon figure (i.e., the porter) and by a demonic gateway. Moreover, the language of rhetorical enchantment directly participates in the transformation, which is precisely Shakespeare’s point. The porter’s bewitching style is part of the message, making the ekphrasis something other than merely representational in nature. The porter’s language is not only concomitant with but also substantive of the spiritual world at issue. Through the porter’s ekphrasis, Shakespeare casts “a darkness visible” across the stage, to borrow Milton’s description of evil. I wonder, in fact, if some of Macbeth’s original audiences felt the same sort of discomfort at the porter’s scene that the audience of Faustus felt on that infamous night when two Devils took the stage at the same time, as the legend goes.17 George Herbert’s “Easter Wings” (1633) reveals the idea of mystical ekphrasis in an even more obvious way, or troubling way, by the standards of Restoration propriety. In the world of mystical rhetorical iconography, however, the poem remains sublime: Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store Though foolishly he lost the same, Decaying more and more, 17. On this story, see Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 230.

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Till he became Most poore: With thee Oh let me rise As larks, harmoniously, And sing this day thy victories: That shall the fall further the flight in me.                       (ll. 1–10)

Many critics reject as superstitious this ingenious impulse toward mystical verbal emblemry, but for those sympathetic to Herbert’s Neoplatonism, which overpowers his Anglican orthodoxy in this case, another experience presents itself in the book. While reading Herbert’s Temple, one travels through the temple. The book is not a pale representation of the religious reality of the Church, mere verbal decoration, or mere allegory. Rather, the book is an instantiation of that reality. The reader experiences the Church’s spiritual and rhetorical architectonics. The book’s forma is an entelechial completion of its content (far beyond the catechistic impulse that Stanley Fish recognizes), and the particular rhetorical forms in the book are best conceptualized as mystically ekphrastic objects, which contain as a part of their ceremonial existence a transportive aura.18 Throughout the poem, Herbert builds sacred spaces and crafts sacred emblems out of language, charging the Temple with reality in the mystical-rhetorical sense of reality. The book is as much a temple as any other piece of the world so deemed. We might also read Dryden’s ekphrases in The Hind and the Panther (1687) as bordering upon the occult. He certainly creates striking images, but he continues to operate within a modern philosophy of style, writing a poetry of statement and of complete syllogisms— as opposed to a poetry of cosmic transports, mystical enthymemes, 18. Stanley Fish, The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). On Herbert’s poetry and religion, see Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Elizabeth Clarke, Theology and Theory in George Herbert’s Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

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and the like—which is to say that Dryden’s later ekphrases are not ekphrastic in the occult sense. He fashions rich allegories, but he does not enchant. Of course, Dryden’s conversion to Catholicism in 1685 should give pause to any scholar who looks for threads of consistency in his philosophy of rhetoric. It is clear that Dryden softens his attitude toward numinous expressions in his later life, post-conversion. Still, he remains committed to a position of moderate rationalism inspired by scientific advancements, a position tempered by the acceptance of transubstantiation’s mystery, but certainly not abandoned because of it. Dryden wore himself out with the phyrric tendencies of his youth, as Louis Bredvold and Phillip Harth explain, but he never disavowed his confidence in reason, which is to say that the Catholic Dryden is by no means an ecstatic mystic.19 He is, rather, a somewhat skeptically minded religious poet who insisted upon stylistic propriety, rationality, and neoclassical craftsmanship. The Catholic Dryden was more closely aligned with Aquinas than was the Anglican Dryden, not surprisingly, and he was more sympathetic to Descartes and the French Enlightenment as well, but not by much. Both Drydens were deeply suspicious of evangelical enthusiasm, especially the rhetorical fire of Milton and Bunyan. And, most important for my argument, the Catholic Dryden—like the Anglican Dryden—understood rhetorical style as ornamentation for the idea itself, not entelechy, style as the teleological manifestation of content, not charm, style as ekphrastic portal. William Blake is perhaps the first post-Enlightenment writer to appreciate fully how different Shakespeare’s and Herbert’s ekphrases are from Dryden’s, different in kind and world, not in degree. He favors the former, beginning the Romantic gothic project of reconstructing the emblematic tradition that the neoclassicists dismantled 19. Bredvold and Harth rightly associate Dryden with the moderate English Catholics, rather than radicals like Thomas White and John Sergeant, both of whom elevated tradition above scripture in the discerning of religious truths. Dryden critiques this Blackloist attitude in The Hind and the Panther, which is a repudiation of heretical Catholicism as much as it is a rejection of Protestantism. See Bredvold, The Milieu of John Dryden, 83–84, 100; Harth, Contexts of Dryden’s Thought, 250–60. See also Anne Barbeau Gardiner, Ancient Faith and Modern Freedom in John Dryden’s The Hind and the Panther (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1998).

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through their language reforms. Blake’s ekphrases, however, seem nostalgic at times, achieving a sense of wonderment that so pervaded Renaissance verbal iconography, but missing that sense of sacred ecstasy, just as one of his contemporaries, Erasmus Darwin, also misses in his own pantheistic Temple of Nature (1802) any real sense of Renaissance mysticism, though he clearly pines for such wonderment. In the end, Blake’s mystical verbal emblems are too troubled in aura, too self-reflexive, to realize the unabashedly cosmic dimension prevalent in occult Renaissance ekphrases, as Shakespeare’s ekphrastic portals and Herbert’s sublime verses vibrantly attest. Using Dryden as an example of a modern, anti-magical rhetor, Murray Krieger highlights this distinction between two kinds of verbal emblems, two kinds of ekphrases. The first kind, ekphrasis as mere mimesis, is straightforward: the purpose is to represent a reality as vividly as possible in language. Dryden belongs to this tradition.20 Contrarily, the occult verbal emblem has a different function entirely, as Krieger argues, though he seems to lose sight of it. For Krieger, the occult verbal emblem involves representing the unrepresentable, which is a peculiar way to characterize the dynamics of magical ekphrasis in the Renaissance.21 Krieger reads the occult verbal emblem as another type of representation, which it is not. It is something other than representational, or something more than representational. Writers of magical ekphrases do not aim to represent an unrepresentable reality. They instead attempt to instantiate a reality, or transmogrify a reality with supernatural enargia, and, perhaps, transport onlookers into a spiritual realm. In the world of occult rhetoric, magical ekphrases participate in metaphysical realities. Such ekphrases do not represent metaphysical realities through various ornaments. Rather, the language itself is reality. Ekphrasis operates as a form of being, not merely as an adornment decorating a form of being. In other words, there is no dissociation of sensibility at work in the occult Renaissance cosmos. In the world of Macbeth’s castle and Herbert’s Temple, image—verbal or otherwise—car20. Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 67–68. 21. Ibid., 93–112.

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ries transformational properties. Ekphrases constitute “identities,” to use Daniel Sennert’s term, not mere analogues for the spiritual realm, which is a decidedly post-Baconian reading of magical description.22 In occult philosophy, charmed ekphrases conjure the world. Description is not simply a form of representation, but rather it is a form of substantiation: it is constitutive of reality. Dryden, of course, is not the first poet to call into question the world of magical ekphrasis. He and other rationalistic philosophers simply institutionalized the attitude, but they have precursors in the early seventeenth century, namely Bacon and his followers. One discovers a proto-Drydenesque moment in 1628, for instance, in John Beaumont’s “Concerning the True Form of English Poetry”: Pure phrase, fit epithets, a sober care Of metaphors, descriptions clear, yet rare, Similitudes contracted, smooth and round, Not vexed by learning, but with Nature crowned: Strong figures drawn from deep inventions, springs, Consisting less in words, and more in things: A language not affecting ancient times, Nor Latin shreds, by which the pendant climbs.                        (ll. 51–58)

The writer of the Norton Anthology’s preface rightly notes the reserved attitude toward ekphrasis in Beaumont, who competes against the more mysterious rhetorical impulses of the metaphysical poets.23 What the writer of the preface passes by, however, is the scientific influence. Beaumont essentially reiterates in verse form Bacon’s argument in The Advancement of Learning, where even a touch of enchantment in rhetorical description becomes evidence of superstition, or what Bacon describes as “Pygmalion’s frenzy.”24 Modern philosophers—including poets influenced by the new experimentalism—detect in occult methods of description a form 22. Sennert, Chymistry Made Easie and Useful, 26. 23. M. H. Abrams, ed., Norton Anthology, 6th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 1774–75. 24. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, 52.

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of apostasy that substitutes the worship of material objects for the worship of God. Against this theological backdrop, Bacon’s renowned idols of the mind are idols in the most literal way, and the same point holds for Dryden, who also places occult ekphrasis in the world of apostasy. Mystics and magicians perceive ekphrasis as capable of positive and negative forms of occult transport, whereas writers in the tradition of modern philosophy perceive only mania in such attitudes toward ekphrasis, not in the good way of divine madness (furor poeticus), as in the case of Plato’s Phaedrus, but rather in the bad way of diabolical madness, or demonic possession, as in the case of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. A theologically minded poet and a believer in witchery, Dryden would readily concede that certain charmed descriptions activate strange transports, which for him would be properly explained in terms of preternatural activity, not the inherent magic of description itself.25 The major distinction informing Dryden’s philosophy of ekphrasis, then, is the major distinction informing most scientific attitudes toward style. Verbal images appear either as accoutrements, mere adornments, or as catalysts or charms that draw efficacy from preternatural sources. For Renaissance sorcerers, the verbal image carries with it the same force as other types of talismans, for example, charms carved from wood or forged with metal. The verbal charm is a magical object, not a representation of reality, but rather an instantiation of reality—an instantiation of truth. New philosophers, on the contrary, describe this occult rhetorical tendency as one more form of enthusiasm, often demonic in nature, not naturally magical, not mystical. This is Dryden’s position. Following Bacon, Dryden further modernizes the act of ekphrasis, forwarding a skeptical attitude toward the power of descriptive language to substantiate reality.

Magical Paronomasia Why does “poor paronomasia” concern Dryden? There are two likely reasons, one involving Restoration manners and the other involving 25. Dryden appropriated the language of magic throughout his career, but he was never a magical writer. Jack Armistead implies otherwise in “Dryden’s Poetry and the Language of Magic,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 27 (1987): 381–98.

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occult philology. First, less interestingly, examples of word play, alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, and so forth, if accomplished often enough, call attention to themselves as artifice. Paronomasia is an act of self-conscious rhetoricity. As such, the trope works against modern philosophical conceptions of natural eloquence, in which the writer desires to make eloquence appear effortless. This is the rhetorical mode of the Restoration gentleman—effortlessness. Any sense of strain or heat recalls Interregnum enthusiasm, however obliquely, which is not a good association in Dryden’s world. For Dryden, eloquence should not reveal itself as eloquence, a point he argues later in the same passage about poor word play: writers must avoid “too curious election of words,” “too frequent allusions” and “tropes,” and anything else “that shows remoteness of thought or labour.”26 Johnson forwards the same sentiment in the next century, suggesting that Shakespeare’s punning is ignoble. Even more troubling to Dryden and other Restoration philosophers is the numinous aura that sometimes touches the act of paronomasia. Using paronomasia, occult writers from the classical period until the late Renaissance recall through sound play and quasi-etymological connection the idea of sympathetic magic. Word play operates as an aspect of enchantment, and it functions in many instances as evidence of cosmic verisimilitude, recalling however indirectly those supernatural and prelapsarian states of language where sound, meaning, and reality converge in cosmic harmony. Plays on words are not merely displays of wit in occult traditions. Rather, they are activators of mystical associative thinking, challenging writers and readers not only to connect ideas, but also to connect languages, styles, and sounds. This is why the trope held such a prominent position in the rhetorical world governed by metaphysical conceits. Roberta Frank explains the significance of mystical paronomasia in medieval and Renaissance language magic, investigating precisely this idea of occult word play that Dryden and his contemporaries in the Royal Society rejected. She makes several arguments 26. Dryden, The Essays of John Dryden, 15.

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about it in a discussion of the Junius 11 manuscript. The manuscript was compiled in the tenth century, but it came to light when Junius published it in 1655. And, as Frank rightly notices, provocative “etymologies” and “word play[s]” were “an undeniable aspect of the medieval verbal imagination”—and of the Renaissance occult imagination—at least until modern scientists successfully challenged numinous concepts of language and the cosmos.27 For mystics and sorcerers, however, as Frank suggests, “the fitting together of alliterative and assonant words ..... proves the mutual relevance of name and essence.”28 Frank makes a point similar to that of D. P. Walker, who explains that Renaissance magic “rests on a theory of language according to which there is a real, not conventional, connection between the words and what they denote,” or, put differently, “the word is not merely like a quality of the thing it designates, such as its color or weight; it is, or exactly represents, its essence or substance.”29 Frank agrees with Walker’s characterization, and provides the following example of occult paronomasia at work in the manuscript: Ælfric has a homily in which he exhorts his countrymen not to mutter such charms over herbs, but to recite Christian prayers instead. He puts it this way: “No sceal nan man mid galdre wyrte besingan, ac mid Godes wordom hi gebletsian” [No word shall enchant herbs with a charm, but shall bless them with God’s words]. Ælfric’s sentence, with its balanced alliterative phrases (the double m-g-w-b), sequences, and the homophonic attraction of wordum and wyrte, seems to imitate the rhetoric of pagan incantations only to disprove their efficacy: By the principle of similia similibus, wyrte are shown to be more susceptible to God’s wurdom than to heathen galdre.30

Through the enactment of paronomasia, the poem’s anonymous author establishes the superiority of Christian prayer over pagan magic, which proves faulty in this case because pagan magic lacks the quasi-etymological, paronomastic qualities that Christian words 27. Roberta Frank, “Some Uses of Paronomasia in Old English Scriptural Verse,” in The Poems of the Junius 11 Manuscript, ed. R. M. Liuzza (London: Routledge, 2002), 70. 28. Ibid. 29. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic, 80–81. 30. Frank, “Some Uses of Paronomasia,” 70–71.

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have in relation to “God’s wurdom.” Paronomasia is a crucial aspect not only of the rhetorical artfulness of the passage, but also of its rhetorical argument. Language functions in a magical-sympathetic manner in the mystical cosmos of the manuscript. Such an enchanted philosophy of language is a world away from Bacon’s and Dryden’s verbal imaginations, where rhetorical style merely dresses the reality of the thing itself. Frank shows that the writers of the Junius manuscript use paronomasia as a weapon against pagan rhetoric. The principle at work here is similia similibus (like produces like): “[The Christian use of paronomasia in the manuscript] was more a matter of beating Saturn at his own game, of converting a style associated with pagan sympathetic magic into a highly effective and sophisticated weapon of Christian supernaturalism.”31 The Christian Anglo-Saxons appropriated pagan charming practices, paying careful attention to plays on words. Of course, preceding and anteceding applications of occult paronomasia are difficult to establish. While the Christians beat “Saturn at his own game,” as Frank phrases it, the Judeo-Christian worldview also preceded Saturn’s game in a crucial sense. If a truly precedent application were to be discovered in the Judeo-Christian tradition, historians of rhetoric would need to look toward the Bible and biblical history. This includes cabalistic ideas about sound and meaning, and it also includes mystical Christian ideas about the Word (and the sound) at the beginning of the world, as described in John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Frank’s main point nonetheless holds. Word play is a serious cosmological act in occult writing. The sounds and arrangements of words encapsulate the essences of the things they denote, under the right cosmic circumstances and through the practiced rhetoric of a priest, or through the practiced rhetoric of a magician. In this way, magical language functions not merely as a substitute for the thing; rather, it functions as an instantiation of the thing. Certain sounds are themselves things, realities, and so to rearrange sounds is to rearrange reality in occult philosophy of language. 31. Ibid., 70.

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This magical way of thinking about paronomasia is far removed from the world of modern rhetoric. As Frank notes, “The style of verbal wit favored by the Old English poets is one that is no longer immediately apparent or appealing to us.”32 Such occult word play, however, was still completely recognizable to Dryden and his generation, though not at all attractive. Dryden was more than likely aware of the Junius manuscript, and he certainly was aware of the occult philosopher’s tendency toward magical word play: the esoteric puns in Shakespeare’s dramas, or the provocative syllepses in metaphysical poetry. To the enlightened Dryden, the occult Renaissance practice of paronomasia appeared as evidence of credulity or demonry—or both. Enchanted paronomasia worked positively in the occult cosmos and fell prey to severe censure in the scientific universe, again demonstrating the rhetorical-ontological gap between the two worlds. Indeed, rhetorical charming and rhetorical skepticism (i.e., a plain attitude toward paronomasia, not an occult one) came into catastrophic conflict with each other in the seventeenth century. Word play nonetheless persists in every age, and, although valued differently and used with a little less frequency in the Restoration, quasi-etymological connections and numerous forms of paronomasia continued to mark texts regularly. Dryden, for example, makes ingenious use of paronomasia in “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day” (1687), applying various linguistic strategies to imitate the sounds of the musical instruments that appear in the poem. Pope puns throughout The Rape of the Lock and the Essay on Criticism, but all of these instances of word play are mere dresses for reality, to recall Pope’s memorable argument: But true expression, like the unchanging sun, Clears and improves whate’er it shines upon; It gilds all objects, but it alters none. Expression is the dress of thought, and still Appears more decent, as more suitable.              (Essay on Criticism, II. 315–19) 32. Ibid.

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Paronomasia as it functions in mainstream English Restoration and Enlightenment rhetoric is a different type of linguistic act, “gild[ing]” objects, in a manner of speaking, but neither constituting nor altering them. In Renaissance occult writing, contrarily, paronomasia is one of several tropes through which mystics and magicians navigate the fundamental harmonies of the universe. In seventeenth-century rhetoric shaped by learning’s advancement (e.g., Dryden’s rhetoric), such enchantment gives way to mere rhetoricity. Plays on words appear as artificial performances, provided that one understands artifice in this context as an invention of the new experimentalism; that is, the new philosophers invent a new naturalism. While approaching word play in texts still touched by Renaissance occultism, we must be sensitive to mystical ideas about sound and reality, if the word play and the world play are to be appreciated on their own terms. Paronomasia in Ælfric’s world of magical rhetoric is not the same linguistic act as it is in Dryden’s world of plain rhetoric. Paronomasia and paronomasia are different things.

Baconian Philosophy of Rhetoric in the Preface to The Mock Astrologer In his preface to The Mock Astrologer (1671), Dryden applies Bacon’s definition of rhetoric to the theater in order to sort out differences between comedy and farce, revealing how he operates as a rhetorical critic of literature: Comedy presents us with the imperfections of human nature: farce entertains us with what is monstrous and chimerical. The one causes laughter in those who can judge of men and manners, by the lively representation of their folly or corruption: the other produces the same effect in those who can judge of neither, and that only by its extravagances. The first works on the judgment and fancy; the latter on the fancy alone; there is more satisfaction in the former kind of laughter, and in the latter more scorn.33

Baconian philosophy of rhetoric reverberates in Dryden’s commentary. Comedy works on the judgment and the fancy. When comedy 33. Dryden, The Essays of John Dryden, 136.

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functions properly, judgment rules the fancy and directs it toward appropriate ends—fitting laughter. Farce, on the contrary, is rhetoric gone awry, where the fancy rules the faculty of judgment and creates monstrous discourse and inappropriate laughter. Farce encourages what Bacon calls a confederacy of the passions and the imagination for the bad moving of the will, a disagreeable combination that overthrows the rational faculty of the self and threatens the good order of society. For Bacon, the most familiar locales of such inappropriate confederacies of thought are the sites of magic, astrology, and other endeavors deemed superstitious. Dryden builds upon this critique of occult philosophy, which, by Dryden’s philosophical standards, also threatens proper art and government. Exactly why farce repulses audiences with good taste and engages audiences with bad taste must be explained in terms of the good audience’s acceptance of learning’s advancements, and, contrarily, the bad audience’s insistence upon an occult worldview: But, how it happens, that an impossible adventure should cause our mirth, I cannot so easily imagine. Something there may be in the oddness of it, because on the stage it is the common effect of things unexpected to surprise us into delight: and that it is to be ascribed to the strange appetite, as I may call it, of the fancy; which, like that of a longing woman, often runs out into the most extravagant desires; and is better satisfied sometimes with loam, or with the rinds of trees, than with the wholesome nourishments of life. In short, there is the same difference betwixt Farce and Comedy, as betwixt an empiric and a true physician: both of them may attain their ends; but what the one performs by hazard, the other does by skill. And as the artist is often unsuccessful, while the mountebank succeeds; so farces more commonly take the people than comedies. For to write unnatural things is the most probable way of pleasing them, who understand not Nature.34

Dryden argues that bad taste in the mass population relates directly to mass superstition. Some audiences are unable to distinguish between good art and bad art precisely because they “understand not Nature.” In fact, too many audiences are in this predicament, Dryden contends, which explains why so much bad art flourishes. Dryden’s 34. Ibid.

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positive implication is that new philosophy not only improves one’s understanding of nature, but also improves one’s understanding of art. Learning’s advancements extend far beyond the confines of the laboratory and into the world of taste and manners. For Dryden, the advancement of science increases every audience’s ability to appreciate good art, because such advancement refines natural taste, allowing people to distinguish between reasonable humor and monstrous humor, or unnatural humor. New science and art go hand in hand on this model. The wise artist welcomes the new experimentalism. Put more forcefully, the wise artist requires it. Otherwise, aesthetic taste becomes prone to bad judgment, or no judgment at all, depending instead upon the undisciplined faculty of fancy alone, which is a formula for disaster (e.g., Interregnum radicalism, canting, bewitchment). Agree or disagree with his aesthetic vision, Dryden’s basic attitude toward art is highly admirable. Bad art functions in his preface as a dire threat to a commonwealth’s well-being. Art is central to society, and corrupt art, or farce, appears as an implicit cause of war. Art and artfulness are in the middle of the seventeenth century matters of life and death. In the passage above, Dryden also makes the customary connection between bad rhetoric and bad food. The consumption of loam and bark functions as an allegory for the consumption of bad rhetoric, the unwholesome rhetoric of low comedy. Accepting such noxious art with the belief that it is healthy for the soul is the equivalent of consuming unwholesome materials, all the while believing that they provide sustenance to the body. In terms of general principles, Dryden makes a good argument, recognizing the real power of degrading rhetoric to corrupt any society that supports it. The food analogy carries with it other provocative implications as well. For example, the contrast between the “empiric” and the “true physician” looms as the dominant antithesis in the passage. Applying this distinction, Dryden disavows Paracelsian herbal magic, the principal type of “empiric” medicine competing against the new medicine of the early Restoration, which emerges from the traditions of John Cotta and William Harvey. More subtly, too, Dryden recalls witchcraft narratives with his dryden, new philosophy, & rhetoric    197

image of the woman consuming loam. He describes a longing woman alone in the forest, “waiting for her demon lover,” as Coleridge later suggests. By placing a wandering woman alone in the forest, Dryden undoubtedly conjures up the image of the witch, or the witches’ coven, secretly meeting in the wilderness and performing perverted rituals of consumption. The devouring of loam signals melancholy at the very least, and probably also demonic possession, where nefarious spirits overtake the rational faculty and cause inappropriate behavior. Nicholas Culpepper, for example, connects the consumption of loam directly to demonry in The Practice of Physic (1655), where he describes how “depraved appetites” desire “loam.”35 Against the backdrop of witchcraft, loam, too, is certainly more troubling than tree bark, given that loam operates in many seventeenth-century contexts as an artful term used to describe the human body absent of spirit. Healey provides such a use of the term in his translation of Augustine’s City of God (1610): “This man therefore” is “framed of dust or lome.”36 Shakespeare uses it similarly in Richard II: “Men are but gilded loam” (I.i. 179). When Dryden uses the image of loam, he creates the connotation of debauched demonic feasting, a form of necromancy involving the ingesting of human flesh absent of spirit. In other words, the woman in the forest substitutes dead material for real nourishment, death for life, in what appears as a demonic ceremony of some type. Presumably, too, the description of loam is intended by the Anglican Dryden as a subtle critique of transubstantiation—a position that Dryden reverses in The Hind and the Panther. An anxiety about demonic eloquence and feminine guile also informs Dryden’s image of the longing woman. In this sense, Dryden’s passage might remind us of Locke’s discussion in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, where he connects rhetorical deception and feminine guile, which in turn recalls the archetypes of Eve and Circe.37 In the case of Locke’s argument, the “Prince of Darkness” looms as the real target of critique.38 And, like Locke, Dryden 35. Nicholas Culpepper, trans., The Practice of Physic (London, 1655), 257. 36. Augustine, City of God, trans. John Healey (London, 1610), 467. 37. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 508. 38. Ibid., 703.

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concerns himself primarily with the idea of demonic eloquence. Dryden is unworried about the category of femininity in general. First and foremost, he targets occult practices, including most obviously witchcraft. As expected, he feminizes the image of the witch in this instance, as writers tend to do in most references to witchcraft in the seventeenth century, even though between 10 and 20 percent of the reported cases of witchery involved men. Nonetheless, the female witch represented an even more extreme and frightening inversion of nature’s order than the male witch, because of how the social logic of the age shaped feminine corruption. This explains why Dryden refers to a longing woman in this case, not a longing man. The woman’s inappropriate appetite intensifies the unnaturalness of the situation even more than a man’s unnatural appetite would, thus heightening the antithesis between the world of the new empiricist and the world of the old empiric, or the world of comedy and the world of farce, as the analogy plays itself out. Femininity in and of itself is not the root cause of the bad rhetoric, and neither does Dryden reject feminine rhetoric. Rather, demonry is the problem, and Dryden directs his critique toward such demonry, in this case figured as the extreme example of the female witch in the forest. Finally, Dryden asks a more comprehensive question with the image of the woman in the wilderness. What is the difference between real inspiration from the Holy Spirit and false inspiration from one’s own imagination, or worse yet, from diabolical sources? This topic has been part of sacred philosophy and rhetoric from the start. The conversation between Satan and Eve turns on it. Satan appears to Eve as an angel of light, inspiring her to taste fruit from the tree of knowledge, which turns out to be loam. The Devil lies. The Devil operates as a fiendish sophist, making the worse appear the better reason to Eve. The first struggle between humanity and Evil in the Judeo-Christian tradition is a rhetorical-hermeneutical struggle, a battle of words and interpretations. Dryden alludes to this primal struggle by describing a woman eating loam in the forest. Closer to Dryden’s own epoch, Descartes ponders this same topic of false and true inspiration in the “Second Meditation.” He wonders how humanity might uncover a rhetorical ruse by an evil genius who dryden, new philosophy, & rhetoric    199

tricks people into believing that they exist. This is the other aspect of cogito ergo sum, where one is fooled into believing that one thinks, still proving existence, but not the sort of existence that Descartes sets out to prove. Dryden’s image of the woman is one more variation upon this same Christian concern about demonic inversion, where evil spirits use combinations of antithesis and irony to move people falsely. The question of how to differentiate between false and true inspiration is an ancient one, but Dryden’s answer contains a modern element: rhetorical plainness, which is also Bacon’s and Descartes’s answer. Mode of rhetoric functions as a key indicator of rationality, or, as the case might be, irrationality. In the circumstance of the woman eating loam, or performing the rhetorical equivalent of eating loam (i.e., occult chants, charms), something appears wrong within the prescribed rhetorical framework of learning’s advancement, to put it straightforwardly and tautologically. An obvious circularity touches Dryden’s argument. Perspicuity in one’s rhetoric verifies proper inspiration, and proper inspiration manifests itself through tropological perspicuity. Perhaps, however, this is an inevitable and instructive antimetabole, not unlike other powerful antimetaboles of the late Renaissance: “witchcraft leads to heresy, and heresy leads to witchcraft,” for example. Certain ideas have simultaneity with other ideas, and Dryden reveals a close relationship between two such ideas. By Dryden’s standards, rhetorical propriety and appropriate inspiration mutually reinforce each other.

Conclusion Ian Robinson concludes his book about the establishment of modern English prose with some final thoughts on Dryden, and fittingly so. In praise of Dryden’s syntactical fluency, Robinson notes that he “has really mastered a way of acclimatizing complex syntactic structures in English, without any tension between grammar and rhythm.”39 He makes the same observation about Cranmer’s smooth sentences, reinforcing his overall argument that Cranmer initiates modern 39. Robinson, Establishment of Modern English Prose, 141.

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English prose and Dryden forwards the syntactical tradition, which should not be conflated with the stylistic tradition. In finding the similarity between Cranmer and Dryden, Robinson faces a problem, however, as he recognizes. Dryden’s prose seems so different from Cranmer’s, but not for any syntactical reason: “To say that Dryden’s prose is a lesser achievement than either Cranmer’s or Bunyan’s is less a technical observation than one about Dryden’s world; so urbane, but without what Lawrence called ‘the depth of vital consciousness’ to be found in Cranmer, or Bunyan, or Shakespeare.”40 Robinson connects Cranmer and Dryden on the level of syntax, but at the same time, he suggests that Dryden, Locke, and other advancers of learning create an entirely new style, essentially agreeing with Sutherland’s remark that after 1660 English prose gets a fresh start, or agreeing with F. R. Leavis’s suggestion along the same lines: “When we ask how it was that modern prose appeared so decisively in the first decade of the Restoration, with an effect of having prevailed over-night, the answer is an account of the total movement of civilization.”41 This second argument, that Dryden lives in a different rhetorical universe than Cranmer, a new rhetorical universe, is the better of the two arguments. Cranmer cannot be credited with establishing modern English prose style, though he points the way syntactically, as Robinson shows. Nonetheless, Cranmer is too mystical a writer to fit into Dryden’s world. While Dryden’s sentences aspire toward the new philosopher’s ideal of plainness, Cranmer’s sentences aspire toward prayer, as do the sentences of most sincere religious writers of the sixteenth century, Catholic and Protestant. Philosophers of rhetoric discover a paradigmatic difference between Cranmer’s sentences and Dryden’s. Cranmer’s philosophy of style is touched by Renaissance mysticism; Dryden’s is not. If by “modern” philosophers of rhetoric we mean writers like Dryden, then Cranmer is not modern. In broader terms, the issue of syntactical fluency is secondary when compared to this conceptual dissociation between occultism 40. Ibid., 164. 41. Sutherland, On English Prose, 67; F. R. Leavis, English Literature in Our Time and the University (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969), 93–94.

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and new science in the rise of modern English rhetoric. The emergence of modern English rhetoric depends upon the rejection of charmed philosophies of style, as Dryden’s project of rhetorical reformation demonstrates. It is impossible to explain one without the other. Modern English rhetoric comes into existence as a direct result of enchantment’s decline in the intellectual circles of the late Renaissance.

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Conclusion

T he I m port ance of Phi l os ophy of Rhe toric

)( Most new philosophers accepted the existence of charmed rhetoric. Their attitudes toward such rhetoric, however, distinguished their activities from the occult methods of magicians and the preternatural modes of witches. Unlike magicians and witches, the experimentalists investigated enchanted language. They applied new science to various realms of esoterica, following Bacon’s mandate to seek out prodigious cases in nature, those peculiar instances where events seem to contradict or transcend what is known about natural law. Experimentalists made magic and witchcraft proper objects of philosophical inquiry. By applying scientific methodology to mysterious practices, they strived for greater insight into the workings of the world. Most important for philosophers of rhetoric, this included the workings of charmed eloquence. Writers attuned to the new philosophy were not out to debunk spell casting. Rather, they wanted to distinguish between authentic and spurious cases of 203

it. For most modern philosophers, bewitchment was a real threat to Restoration society, as is evidenced by witchcraft’s premier position as a dangerous idiom in the period’s religious controversies. Sprat’s critique of witchery and Locke’s admonition against the Devil’s beguiling rhetoric are enough to remind us that demonic eloquence loomed large in the minds of the Royal Society’s prominent members. But through scientific study, these advancers of learning believed that they would be better equipped to protect themselves from demonic conjuration. They also believed that they would be better prepared to protect England from the discourses of diabolical sorcery, appearing in the forms of astrological bedazzlement, nonconformist furor, Catholic and Lutheran mysticism, and Rosicrucian enchantment. Moreover—and this is where the rhetorical reforms come into play—the new experimentalists needed an instrument through which to carry out a study of charmed eloquence, a mode of language safely removed from the magical and mystical rhetorical ideas that they wished to identify as either demonic or credulous. This is the starting point of the plain style reforms. The challenge was to create a style, a philosophy of style, by which the esoteric could be talked about, but not invoked, intimated, or otherwise involved. The problem with talking about mysterious rhetoric while simultaneously existing in the twilight of an occult rhetorical paradigm is that the language itself is prone to carry quasi-magical intimations. The advancers of learning comprehended this challenge. They did not want to cast spells while arguing against spell casting, and so they resolved to write in a plain way. That is, they created a modern philosophy of rhetoric, one in which tropes operated as mere ornaments, rather than charmed devices capable of transmogrifying reality. For occult philosophers and other practitioners of the mysterious arts, this plain mode of writing was entirely wrongheaded from the beginning, because it was based upon a fundamental misunderstanding of rhetoric’s nature. In the occult Renaissance cosmos, language itself was imbued with reality, and it imbued reality. Rhetoric could in fact change lead into gold, transmute hearts, and drag rocks and trees with it, if applied properly by the practiced sorcerer, as the 204   philosophy of rhetoric

story of Amphion illustrated in the classical world. Because it had natural spiritual force ordained by the Creator, rhetoric could never be a disinterested instrument for the Renaissance magicians. Contrarily, for the new experimentalists, language needed to be absolutely disinterested, unsympathetic in the magical-rhetorical sense, if a proper accounting of nature’s book was to be written. Most importantly, this included a non-enchanted understanding of style. Herein lies the fundamental dissociation of sensibility on the rhetorical level. New philosophers reformulated the very nature of what rhetoric was and how it functioned in the world. In a maneuver that itself seems almost magical, experimentalists transformed the numinous idioms of the occult Renaissance cosmos into cold matter. They turned golden words into lead words, by the standard of the Renaissance magus. And as one crucial consequence, rhetorical style became for the modern sensibility a mere adornment for the life of the mind, an incidental decoration, rather than a substantiation of content, as it functioned in occult philosophies of rhetoric. What, then, is the wisdom in my account of the seventeenthcentury plain language reforms? While I have answered this question throughout, I would like here to re-emphasize a couple of ideas. To begin, we must be careful not to impose upon late Renaissance rhetoric a contemporary understanding of style, which remains in many academic settings an impoverished one, governed almost entirely by aesthetic concerns, and, more deeply, by a materialistic assumption: that language is mere matter, rather than spiritual-ontological substance—the mysterious ether that connects the human mind to the Divine essence. Or, in its demonic application, language is the ontological ether that connects the human mind to pandemonium, hopelessness, and gloom. This second point—language as ontological—is not meant to be vague, which can be a problem with grand explanations. Rather, I mean to point directly to the traditional biblical understanding of God as the Word, the Creator who made “the heavens” out of “the breath of his mouth” (Ps 33:6) and who, moreover, gave humanity the world-shaping power of rhetoric, an idea far removed from the modern perception of tropes as decorative objects. philosophy of rhetoric    205

More generally, the art of rhetoric remains in the imaginations of many critics a discipline concerned primarily with packaging knowledge, rather than creating it. This attitude can be traced back in large part to reformulations of rhetoric in the seventeenth century, when language and ontology were categorically separated from each other (i.e., the new plain style), leaving only a shell of rhetoric, where there used to be a metaphysics. Some contemporary theorists, of course, have successfully revived aspects of preEnlightenment rhetorical traditions, where questions of rhetoric, theology, epistemology, and ontology were naturally connected, and even central to the rhetorical tradition. But in the wake of the Enlightenment materialization of language, the more substantial theologies of rhetoric that pervaded the worlds of Renaissance magic and mysticism have yet to re-emerge in new and timely configurations. The main problem—the one I would most like to stress—is that spiritually minded philosophers still have been all too willing to agree to the fundamentally modern presupposition that language is only a material object, which is to deny the numinous auras and capabilities that swirl through, in, and as words and tropes. While the Enlightenment confidence in detached rationality has waned considerably, the Enlightenment precept that language is mere matter has not, and it is precisely this tenet that has kept most of the rhetorical tradition in a perpetual state of materialism for the past three centuries, which is an undesirable state of affairs. Perhaps I have helped point the way to a remedy, which has as its first movement a step backwards into history, a careful re-evaluation of the world’s disenchantment in the early modern period, of the collapse of vitalism, of the decline of mystery. Of course, such a reconsideration is unnecessary in some circles, where mystery, rhetoric, and enchantment have persisted, functioning in the shadows of the Enlightenment. In other circles, this re-evaluation is well underway, from the revisiting of pre-modern cosmologies and epistemologies to the rise of mystical hermeneutics. My addition to these provocative lines of inquiry is that the re-enchantment of the world has a significant rhetorical component: the return of enchanted tropes. And part of this return involves the categorical precept that language itself has 206   philosophy of rhetoric

a spiritual dimension to be studied and theorized, using terms such as “aura” and “glow.” Indeed, rhetoric can move Spirit, even when that rhetoric is little more than a groan. Or, in straightforward and edifying terms, prayer works. But there is an opposite movement of rhetoric and spirit too, which I examined most carefully in chapter 4, and which might be summed up just as cogently as the comment above about prayer: witchery works. And evil idioms infect people, and congregations of people, to very bad ends. Both truths, the truth of prayer and the truth of demonry, however, fall by the wayside in the world of deism, the theological crescendo of the Enlightenment trajectory, which presupposes a material word, and which has as its most insidious rhetorical consequence the trapping of the human voice in a realm of dusty bric-a-brac, spokes and gears, linguistic rubble. But this—the dead stuff of the world, including the dead idioms of the world—is not the Christian promise articulated so clearly by Paul in the sixth chapter of Romans, where Christ’s resurrection is also humanity’s resurrection, and where the redeemed cosmos is animated not by the tyranny of sin and death (animation as demonic possession, entropy, and decay), but rather by the infused love of God Almighty, who defeated despair on the cross. Through Christ, that is, rhetoric has spiritual power. In summary, the plain language reforms in seventeenth-century England ought to be understood as part of a much broader argument between magic and mystery on the one hand, and, on the other hand, experimental science, mainly of the latitudinarian sort. Once this philosophical framework for language reform is established, the arguments advocating plain rhetoric throughout the period—beginning with Francis Bacon’s—are much easier to discern for what they really are: repudiations of magical and mystical philosophies of eloquence.

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Bi bl iogr aphy

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I ndex

() Aarsleff, Hans, 32n, 51n, 55n Act of Oblivion, 80 Adam, 35–36, 55, 92, 94, 96–97, 171 Adolph, Robert, 2n, 76n Ady, Thomas, 104 Aeschylus, 178–79 Agrippa, Cornelius, 13n, 17, 64, 89, 93n, 99, 108, 168 Albrecht, Roberta, 17n Alchemy, 4, 14–17, 21–22, 37, 46, 58, 62–63, 73n, 81, 92, 95–96, 101, 111 Allegory, 22, 98, 153, 155–56, 186–87, 197 Allen, Don Cameron, 13n Allestree, Richard, 71n Alliteration, 191–92 Altegoer, Diana, 12n Amazons, 130–31, 133 Ambrosus, Theseus, 170 Amphion, 13, 34, 90, 205 Amulets, 21n Anabaptists, 162, 166 Anagrams, 53 Analogy, 14–17, 21–24, 26, 55, 63, 73, 81–82, 96, 101, 105, 120, 132, 155, 159, 182, 189, 197–99 Anarchy, 122 Andrewes, Lancelot, 181 Angels, 15, 23, 27, 29, 43–44, 102n, 118, 152–53, 157, 169–72, 199 Anglicanism, 18, 28, 42–43, 50, 57, 59, 65–67, 72, 74–77, 80–82, 98–100, 110, 128–29, 144, 147–58, 162–67, 171, 186–87, 198

Anglo-Saxons, 193 Antichrist, 77–79, 84, 125–29, 131, 181 Antimetabole, 116, 130, 200 Antipathies, 104 Antiphrasis, 116, 135 Antithesis, 2, 40, 49, 58, 82, 115–39, 181–82, 199–200 Antonomasia, 106 Aphrodite, 13 Apocalypse, 77–80 Apparitions, 29, 40, 158 Aquinas, Thomas, 74, 107–8, 122, 187 Aristotle, 30, 80, 131, 133, 149, 154, 160, 167, 176 Arakelian, Paul, 51n Armadel, 91n Armistead, Jack, 190n Ashmole, Elias, 38, 49, 93, 103 Assonance, 191–92 Astrology, 4, 13–14, 20–22, 46, 63, 66–67, 73n, 79, 83, 89, 95, 98, 101, 108–12, 155, 164, 172–73, 195–96, 204 Atheism, 29, 43–44, 47 Atomism, 16 Augustine, 7, 32n, 44n, 79–80, 107–8, 110, 123, 137–38, 142, 155, 182, 198 Babel, 65–66 Bacon, Francis, 1–4, 11–20, 23–26, 30, 34, 40, 42–46, 48, 52, 57–64, 66, 73, 76, 98, 100, 114, 147, 151, 159–60, 167, 171, 174, 176–77, 179–80, 189–90, 193, 195–200, 203, 207

227

Baker, Courtland, 184n Bakhtin, Mikhail, 136–37 Bale, John, 67, 78 Ball, Bryan, 77–78 Barber, C. L., 135 Barilli, Renato, 22n Barnard, Richard, 123n Barrow, Isaac, 71n Bayle, Pierre, 157 Beaumont, John, 189 Beeler, Stanley, 92n Bennett, Joan, 51n Berman, Morris, 6n Bireley, Robert, 130n Blake, William, 141, 187–88 Bloom, Harold, 178 Blount, Thomas, 20n Boehme, Jacob, 98, 100, 163 Boguet, Henri, 122, 136 Bono, James, 93n Booker, John, 98 Booth, Wayne, 137n Bostridge, Ian, 117n Boswell, James, 176n Boucher, Jean, 117–18 Boyle, Marjorie O’Rourke, 6n Boyle, Robert, 28, 45, 83 Bramhall, John, 86 Bredvold, Louis, 176n, 187 Brereton, William, 40 Briggs, Robin, 134n Brown, David, 76n Browne, Thomas, 11, 24–26, 29, 86, 101, 158, 161, 181 Bunyan, John, 187, 201 Burnet, Gilbert, 71, 76, 82–85, 157 Burnham, Frederic, 99n Burton, Robert, 16n Butler, Samuel, 58, 64–70, 112 Cabala, 97, 193 Cacarchy, 122, 126, 131, 136 Caligula, 153 Calvinists, 128, 158 Campbell, George, 63, 161 Canters, 98 Casaubon, Meric, 4, 66, 146–73 Cassirer, Ernst, 14n

Castle, Terry, 135, 137 Catechism, 78, 149–50, 186 Catholicism, 18, 26, 40–42, 67–68, 75–78, 80–81, 87n, 126–30, 141, 154–56, 164, 187, 201, 204 Cawdrey, Robert, 67 Cerberus, 65–66, 70 Characters, 20–21, 94–96, 107, 118, 169–70, 173 Charleton, Walter, 27 Charms, 2, 6–7, 9–46, 58–59, 73, 76, 84, 88–90, 95, 97, 101–7, 110–11, 120, 127, 154, 171, 174, 189–94, 200, 203–4 Cheke, John, 67, 78, 126n, Chemistry, 20–23, 46, 105 Chiasmus, 116 Chiromancy, 10, 20, 67, 110 Christianson, Francis, 72–73 Christmas, 136 Christopherson, John, 129 Chrysostom, John, 83 Churton, Tobias, 49n Cibber, Colley, 79 Cicero, 19, 151, 154, 167 Circe, 18, 34, 55, 198 Civil War, 4, 74, 128, 148, 151–52, 181 Clark, Donald, 135n Clark, Stuart, 6–7, 78, 89n, 117n, 118n, 122n, 126n, 143, 152n Clarke, Elizabeth, 186n Clarendon, Bishop, 25, 157 Clucas, Stephen, 169n Clulee, Nicholas, 46, 169n Cohen, Murray, 51n Cohn, Norman, 77n Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 82, 198 Conjurors, 50, 89, 91, 102–4, 110–11, 128, 168–71, 189, 204 Conley, Thomas, 2n, 50, 54n Constantine, 183 Consubstantiation, 81 Cookery, 73–74, 80, 120 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, 60n Cooper, Thomas, 128 Copenhaver, Brian, 89n Cope, Jackson, 41n Cosmology, 5–6, 14–16, 29, 152, 171 Cotta, John, 197

228   index

Coudert, A. P., 93n Council of Lateran, 81 Covino, William, 102n Cowley, Abraham, 58–64, 70, 82, 145 Cranach, Lucas, 78, 126n Crane, R. S., 54n Cranmer, Thomas, 78, 200–201 Crashaw, Richard, 64, 183–84 Craven, J. B., 16n Croll, Morris, 2n, 31n, 53n, 72, 117 Croll, Oswald, 95–96 Cromwell, Oliver, 76, 85–87, 136, 153, 156–57, 161–64 Cryptograms, 53 Crystalline sphere, 63 Culpepper, Nicholas, 198 Cynicism, 7, 11, 24 Daedalus, 26 Dear, Peter, 51n Debus, A. G., 14n, 16n, 92n Dante, 6, 122 Daphne, 61 Darwin, Erasmus, 188 Davenant, William, 177–78 Dee, John, 17, 21n, 37, 46, 99, 104, 162, 168–73 Deism, 18, 29, 45, 47, 207 Demosthenes, 67, 176 de Romilly, Jacqueline, 140n Descartes, Rene, 41, 57, 87, 100, 142, 179, 187, 199–200 Diggers, 161 Dissimulation, 116, 120–22, 131, 150 Dissociation of sensibility, 4, 113, 160, 188, 205 Divination, 13, 43, 109–11, 148, 155, 157, 165–67 Donne, John, 16–17, 22, 36, 64, 86, 181, 183 Doppelganger, 136 Downame, George, 116 Drake, Stillman, 95n Dryden, John, 4, 53, 64, 86–87, 146–47, 160, 174–202 Duncan, Edgar Hill, 17n Durham, James, 77

Eamon, William, 89n Eden, 56, 97, 170 Edwards, Michael, 6n Ekeland, Ivar, 45n Ekphrasis, 38, 181–90 Eliot, T. S., 160 Emblems, 4, 12–15, 73, 89, 103, 159, 182–83, 186–88 Enargia, 182, 188 Endor, 110 Enoch, 171 Entelechy, 10, 67, 70, 113, 161, 186–87 Enthusiasm, 57, 82, 144, 146–68 Enthymeme, 30, 186–87 Epicureanism, 28, 138, 148 Epigram, 181 Erasmus, 53, 167, 180 Eschatology, 77–79, 126n Etymology, 140, 191–92, 194 Eve, 36, 55, 198–99 Exorcism, 28, 127, 145, 148 Faculty psychology, 63 Fahnestock, Jeanne, 39n, 51n Fairies, 62 Falstaff, John, 119 Fascination, 34, 143 Faustus, 56, 124, 152, 169, 185 Ficino, Marsilio, 64, 93n, 108, 168, 173n Fish, Stanley, 32n, 141, 186 Fletcher, Angus, 17n Fletcher, John, 175 Fludd, Robert, 15–16 Frank, Roberta, 191–94 Frankenstein, 13n Freemasonry, 49n French, Peter, 169n Freud, Sigmund, 119, 137n Funkenstein, Amos, 84n Furor lectoris, 184n Furor poeticus, 184, 190 Gadbury, John, 110 Galileo, 95–96 Gardiner, Anne Barbeau, 187n Gaukroger, Stephen, 12n Gaule, John, 103–4, 118–19, 124, 128 Geneva, Ann, 111–12

Index    229

Gerhard, Andreas, 124–25 Gestalt, 11, 37, 123, 154 Gibbon, Edward, 165 Gibbons, Brian, 89n, 163n Glanvill, Joseph, 11, 25, 29–46, 50, 52–53, 68, 92, 97, 102n, 109, 111, 129, 144, 159, 163, 168, 175 Gleik, James, 93n Glory, 85–87, 94 Gold, 15, 21, 42, 68, 79, 85, 204–5 Golinski, Jan, 20n Gorgias, 80, 156 Gothic, 187 Gouk, Penelope, 89n Grace, 17n, 70, 75, 150 Graham, Kenneth, 32n Gray, Hanna, 135n Grebel, Conrad, 162 Green, Mary Elizabeth, 59n Greenslet, Ferris, 31n Grell, Peter Ole, 14n Griffin, Martin, 71n Gross, Alan, 39n Guibbory, Achsah, 186n Hacking, Ian, 84n Halley, Edmund, 60 Hamilton, K. G., 181n Hannaway, Owen, 96, 113n Harkness, Deborah, 169n Harlots, 56, 80, 130–34 Harrison, Peter, 27n Harth, Phillip, 176n, 187 Harvey, William, 61–64, 197 Healey, John, 198 Hedonism, 156 Hegel, Wilhelm, 84 Heidegger, Martin, 6n Heliocentrism, 14n Hell, 118, 122, 126, 139–40, 184–85 Heninger, S. K., 14n Henningsen, Gustav, 118n Henry VIII, 129 Herbert, George, 69–70, 185–88 Herford, C. H., 24–25, 119n Hermeneutics, 6n, 111, 199, 206 Hermeticism, 103 Herrick, James, 45n

Heuristics, 62, 67, 75–76, 87, 149 Hex, 51 Heyd, Michael, 147n Heydon, John, 94–95 Heywood, Thomas, 118 Hinman, Robert, 59n Hobbes, Thomas, 11, 24–30, 105 Holland, Henry, 123, 128 Holy Spirit, 57–58, 75, 163, 184n, 199 Horace, 19 Howell, A. C., 51n Howell, Wilbur Samuel, 51n Houyhnhnms, 166 Huffman, William, 16n Hüllen, Werner, 51n Hume, David, 28, 157, 165 Humors, 74–76, 80, 82 Hunter, Michael, 147n Husserl, 142 Hutchenson, Francis, 44 Hutter, Jacob, 162 Hyperbole, 106, 108n, 116, 160 Hysteron proteron, 106 Iconography, 20n, 145, 185, 188 Idealism, 7 Identities, 22, 189 Idolatry, 12, 74, 126n, 171, 190 Incantations, 2, 21n, 33, 75, 89, 95, 102, 117, 171–73, 192 Indulgences, 127 Inkhorn words, 66–67 Illumination, 55–57, 66, 84, 98, 102, 155, 162–63 Intelligent Design, 37n Inversion, 56, 80, 82, 115–41, 169, 199–200 Irony, 56, 58, 70, 96, 116–29, 132–34, 137–38, 200 Jack, Ian, 66n James I, 44, 116, 137 Jesuits, 158 Jesus Christ, 78, 81, 125, 137, 141, 183, 207 Joan of Arc, 91 Jobe, Thomas, 41n Johnson, Samuel, 64, 122, 176, 191 Jones, R. F., 1, 2n, 31n, 39, 53n, 70–71

230   index

Jones, William, 60n Jonson, Ben, 5, 119, 121 Joseph, Miriam, 135n Jost, Walter, 6n Junius Manuscript, 192–94 Kassell, Lauren, 91n Keats, John, 76 Keckermann, Bartholomew, 127–28 Kelley, Edward, 171–72 Kepler, Johannes, 16n, 37n Kierkegaard, Søren, 10 Korshin, Paul, 147–48, 158, 161 Kramer, Heinrich, 132–33, 135–36, 140 Krieger, Murray, 188 Kristeller, Paul, 14n, 135n Kroll, Richard, 52 Kuhn, Thomas, 84 Lancashire witches, 104, 120–21 Lanham, Richard, 135n Laplace, Pierre, 45n Latimer, Hugh, 78 Latitudinarians, 42, 71, 74, 81, 83, 152, 158, 160, 207 Law, Jules, 55n Lawrence, D. H., 201 Leavis, F. R., 201 Lewis, C. S., 135n Lilly, William, 98, 109–10, 112, 163, 172 Liotes, 116 Lloyd, A. C., 184n Lloyd, Claude, 176n Loam, 68n, 196–200 Locke, John, 15, 38–39, 48, 50, 54–58, 86, 105, 144, 165, 198, 201, 204 Longinus, 121, 178–79 Love, 12, 15, 61, 73, 100, 110, 120, 126n, 131–32, 148, 198, 207 Lovejoy, Arthur, 14n Lucan, 181 Lutherans, 75, 77–78, 81, 127, 158, 182, 204 Lycurgus, 164 Macbeth, 56, 62, 72, 95, 119, 132, 139–40, 151–52, 169, 184–85, 188, 190 MacDonald, Hugh, 51n

MacDonald, Ross, 45–46 Macfarlane, Alan, 117n Macrocosm and microcosm, 14–16, 21, 24–25, 63, 94, 101, 105, 161 Madness, 153, 159, 190 Magdalene, Mary, 183 Maggi, Armando, 140–43 Magnet, 16n Magnus, Albertus, 13n Malapropism, 68 Mann, Thomas, 152 Manz, Felix, 162 Markley, Robert, 51n, 71n Marvell, Andrew, 64, 164 Mason, James, 107, 118, 124–25 Masquerade, 82, 132, 135–38 Materialism, 4–5, 7, 11, 24, 27–30, 37, 47, 143, 148, 166, 190, 205–7 Maus, Katharine Eisaman, 177n Mazzeo, Joseph, 14n McIntosh, Carey, 50n Mechanicalism, 28–29, 37–38, 45, 60, 148, 166, 178 Medcalf, Stephen, 35–36, 38–39 Mede, Joseph, 77 Melancholy, 16n, 29, 155, 157, 198 Melanchthon, Philipp, 126n Mephistopheles, 124 Merlin, 91, 109, 168 Mersenne, Marin, 173n Metaphor, 2, 10, 22, 25–26, 30–34, 38, 53, 73, 80–82, 96, 98–101, 105, 189 Metaphysical Poetry, 15–16, 35–36, 53, 64, 84–86, 96, 181–83, 189, 191, 194 Metonym, 22, 31, 41–42, 81, 83, 96–97, 127, 130, 139, 155, 163 Milbank, John, 6n Millenarians, 77 Milton, John, 6, 76, 121–22, 143–44, 156, 163, 171, 183, 185, 187 Minos, 158, 164 Miracles, 17–18, 45, 60, 104, 128 Misrule, 82, 135–38 More, Henry, 40, 43–44, 82, 99–101, 105 Morrissey, Mary, 76n Moses, 91 Moss, Jean Dietz, 39n Mulligan, Lotte, 71n, 100

Index    231

Napier, John, 77 Nate, Richard, 50n Naudé, Gabriel, 91 Necromancy, 81, 103, 109–10, 128, 172, 198 Neo-Ciceronianism, 72 Neoclassicism, 158 Neoplatonism, 4, 111–12, 114, 154, 186 Nero, 153, 156 New Atlantis, 180 Newman, William, 20n, 105n Newton, Isaac, 28, 60, 93n Nicolson, Marjorie Hope, 14n, 60n Norford, Don Parry, 14n Notestein, Wallace, 117n Obsession, 73, 143 Odysseus, 26, 133 Old English, 194 O’Malley, C. D., 95n Onomatopoeia, 191 Ong, Walter, 6n, 68–69 Oracles, 109–10, 116, 124, 154–55 Orality, 68 Ormsby-Lennon, Hugh, 92 Orpheus, 13, 21, 34, 154–55 O’Rourke, Sean Patrick, 12n Osler, Margaret, 84n Overton, Richard, 162 Pagel, Walter, 14n Pandemonium, 121, 141, 205 Pantheism, 40, 99, 188 Parable, 101 Paracelsus, 13n, 14–15, 17, 21–22, 46, 63, 197 Paralepsis, 142, 154, 165 Parker, Samuel, 98–99, 109, 164 Paronomasia, 17, 36, 68, 83, 96, 174, 181, 190–95 Peacham, Henry, 167 Pechter, Edward, 179n Perkins, William, 23, 106, 123, 125–27 Perry, John, 137n Pharmacy, 80–82 Philalethes, Eugenius, 93 Physico-theology, 27, 58 Pietism, 163

Plato, 62, 80, 91, 100–101, 133, 148, 159–60, 190 Plett, Heinrich, 135n Plotinus, 100–101 Plutarch, 148 Pope, Alexander, 4, 64, 70, 79–80, 131, 194 Port Royals, 53, 114, 182 Possession, 6, 27–29, 40, 56, 127, 138–44, 152–56, 159, 169, 190, 198, 207 Postlapsarian, 94, 96 Potkay, Adam, 51n Prayer, 5, 72, 102, 116, 124, 148, 151, 153, 162, 165–67, 169–70, 185, 192, 201, 207 Prelapsarian, 21, 35–36, 92, 94, 96–97, 102, 170, 191 Prince of Darkness, 55–56, 91, 105, 198 Principe, Lawrence, 20n, 105n Printing press, 68 Prior, Moody, 42n Pronunciation, 65, 67–69, 91 Prophecy, 77, 109–10, 149 Prosopopia, 37 Psychokinesis, 34 Pun, 35–36, 191, 194 Puritanism, 23, 75–77, 99, 106, 111, 149– 50, 153, 156, 162, 166 Puttenham, George, 19 Pygmalion, 12–13, 73–74, 159, 189 Quakers, 161 Quintilian, 19, 149, 178–79 Ramus, Peter, 75, 149 Ranters, 40, 99, 161 Rattansi, P. M., 92n Rebhorn, Wayne, 136n Red Cross Knight, 37, 145 Reedy, Gerard, 76n Reformation, 78, 83, 127–30, 181 Relics, 74, 126, 155, 171 Remy, Nicholas, 117–18, 166–67 Ricoeur, Paul, 6n Right reason, 158 Roberts, Alexander, 107n Robinson, Ian, 1–2, 32n, 53n, 72, 85–87, 168, 200–201 Rogers, John, 51n

232   index

Rollock, Robert, 129 Romanticism, 13, 76, 136–37, 141, 187 Rosicrucians, 4, 34, 42, 61, 67, 88, 91–103, 108–9, 163, 173, 181, 204 Rossi, Paolo, 12n Royal Society, 3, 11, 20, 24–31, 40–44, 47–55, 57–61, 64, 67, 70–71, 76, 79, 82–86, 92–93, 97, 102–3, 105, 108–9, 112–14, 129, 143–45, 148–49, 161, 166–67, 174–76, 180, 182, 191, 204 Sacraments, 42, 68, 81, 89, 107, 118, 154 Sadducism, 29, 44, 47, 148, 166 Satan, 3, 40, 56–58, 78, 106, 108, 117–18, 121–23, 126–27, 138–43, 144, 199 Saturn, 193 Saturnalia, 135–36 Scot, Reginald, 44 Scoular, Kitty, 14n Scrying stone, 37, 171 Second advent, 78 Second Coming, 84 Seekers, 161 Self-deception, 149–51 Seneca, 32n Sennert, Daniel, 11, 20–25, 30, 42, 46, 189 Shadwell, Thomas, 120–21 Shakespeare, William, 15, 36, 56, 62, 72, 95, 119, 132, 139–40, 151–52, 169, 175–81, 184–85, 187–88, 190–91, 194, 198, 201 Shape-changers, 42 Shapiro, Barbara, 71n Sharpe, James, 117n Shelley, Mary, 13 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 76 Shrews, 130–32 Shuger, Debora, 6n, 32n, 51n, 53n Shumaker, Wayne, 89n Sidrophel, 112 Signatures, 96, 170 Sinclair, George, 40 Sirens, 55, 133 Skepticism, 22, 24–30, 35, 38, 42–45, 47, 52, 101, 105, 142–43, 152, 157, 173n, 187, 190, 194 Skinner, Quentin, 30n Skouen, Tina, 181n

Slaughter, M. M., 113n Sloane, Thomas, 135n Smith, John, 116 Smith, Nigel, 163n Snider, Alvin, 66n Snow, 37n, 121n Solecism, 175 Sophistry, 41, 55–56, 80, 111, 120, 132, 138, 156, 199 Soothsayers, 98, 124 Spencer, Edmund, 130–31, 145 Spiller, Michael R. G., 147, 149n, 163n, 166n Spiritus mundi, 17, 90 Spleen, 15 Sprat, Thomas, 1, 25, 48–54, 56, 58–61, 63, 73, 76, 86, 92, 111–12, 144, 148, 168, 174–75, 204 Sprenger, James, 133, 135–36 Spurr, John, 71n, 165n Srigley, Michael, 51n Stapleton, Thomas, 130 Stark, Ryan J., 78n, 121n, 184n Stevens, James, 12n Stillman, Robert, 2n, 50 Stock, Robert, 41n Sullivan, Robert, 45n Sutherland, James, 2n, 48, 201 Swearingen, C. Jan, 137n Swift, Jonathan, 64, 113, 148n, 166, 180 Sublimity, 10, 45, 60, 70, 76, 81, 101, 121, 146, 161, 175, 179, 181, 183–85, 188 Succubae, 91, 119, 131 Syllepsis, 194 Sympathies, 34, 70, 102, 104, 191, 193, 205 Synecdoche, 96 Szonyi, Gyorgy, 169n Talismans, 21n, 190 Tasso, Torquato, 131 Tennyson, Alfred, 4 Theosophy, 76 Theseus, 164 Theurgy, 2, 4, 6, 13, 17, 19, 21, 67, 91n Thomas, Keith, 89n, 135, 185n Thorndike, Lynn, 91n, 104, 108 Tillotson, John, 71, 76–83, 84 Tillyard, E. M. W., 14n

Index    233

Toulmin, Stephen, 5–6 Tracy, David, 6 Transmutation, 41–42, 97, 204 Transubstantiation, 42, 68n, 80–82, 127, 187, 198 Trithemius, 91n Tumbleson, Raymond, 75n Utilitarianism, 10, 32n, 42, 70, 114, 147n, 166, 179 Van Helmont, Jean, 105–6 Vaughan, Henry, 64 Vaughan, Thomas, 49, 86, 93, 99–102 Vickers, Brian, 2n, 12n, 22n, 32n, 50, 68, 90, 102n, 108n, 183 Viret, Pierre, 128 Virgil, 181 Vischer, Christop, 125–26 Waite, A. E., 92n Walker, D. P., 89n, 90, 108, 142, 192 Wallace, Karl, 12n Wallace, William A., 39n Walmsley, Peter, 55n Ward, John, 140n Ward, Seth, 97, 163 Watson, George, 181n Webber, Joan, 51n Webster, Charles, 14n, 108 Webster, John, 94–98, 103, 163, 172–73

Weltanschauung, 7, 11, 32n, 87, 123 Westfall, Richard, 71n, 93n Westman, Robert, 16n, 20n Whiston, William, 28 White, Michael, 93n Wilkins, John, 25, 50, 54n, 66, 71–76, 86, 97, 109, 111, 163, 167–68 Williamson, George, 32n Willis, Thomas, 40 Wilson, Frank, 51n Wilson, Thomas, 19, 66–67, 78, 97, 126n, 167 Winn, James Anderson, 176n Witchcraft, 2–5, 18–19, 23, 27–29, 35, 40–44, 47–56, 58–59, 61–62, 75, 80–83, 88–91, 98, 101–12, 115–46, 148, 152, 154, 157–59, 167–68, 170–72, 174, 185, 190, 197–200, 203–4, 207 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 7, 32n Woolley, Benjamin, 169n Worden, Blair, 79n Word play, 36, 53, 191–95 Wordsworth, William, 76 Yates, Frances, 6, 88n, 89n, 92, 104, 108, 163n, 173 Yeats, William Butler, 114 Young, Brian, 71n Zeitgeist, 48, 59, 84 Zwicker, Steven, 179n

234   index

Rhetoric, Science, & Magic in Seventeenth-Century England was designed and typeset in Filosofia by Kachergis Book Design of Pittsboro, North Carolina. It was printed on 60-pound Natures Book Natural and bound by ThomsonShore of Dexter, Michigan.