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theses

This dissertation argues that the emergence of a new intellectual paradigm I call “possible knowledge”—encompassing projective, probable, counterfactual, hypothetical, conjectural, and prophetic ways of thinking—shaped literary and scientific writing in Renaissance England. The project uncovers a prehistory of scientific probability, still perceived as an Enlightenment-era phenomenon, by focusing on a constellation of speculative modes of knowing that drew on the imagination in the face of epistemic uncertainty. Possible knowledge emerges from elements crucial to our understanding of the literary, including mimesis, utopian discourse, and dramatic enactment, and it crosses generic boundaries. The disruption of prophetic certainty, for instance, informs the action in William Shakespeare’s _Macbeth_, while the unrepeatable epic events in John Milton’s _Paradise Lost_ reveal why contemporary experimental methods—which could produce only probable knowledge about the natural world—were insufficient to explicate prelapsarian states of being. I engage with the history and philosophy of science to show how the techniques of writing associated with possible knowledge are visible across modern disciplinary divides: the error and the endlessness that govern Edmund Spenser’s epic-romance, _The Faerie Queene_, are at the heart of the modern scientific epistemology laid out in Francis Bacon’s inductive method. And as Margaret Cavendish’s utopian experiment with cognitive realms in _The Blazing World_ underscores, possibility could allow authors intellectual freedom and creativity in their engagement with the material world. By focusing on hypothetical and suppositional modes of thinking, I map the contours of the humanities and the sciences as these began to assume their modern disciplinary forms.

ETD_5399

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Debapriya Sarkar

doi:10.7282/T3S75DPG

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.