2 - Purity and the dissemination of knowledge in Bacon's new science

Summary

… chaste, holy, and legal wedlock.

Bacon, “The Masculine Birth of Time”

In Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas argues that the “body is a model which can stand for any bounded system … [whose] boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious.” Her analysis is dialectical rather than causal: The corporal body is both the source of a culture's comprehension and delineation of its figurative bodies, and the site of contestation between what is perceived as pure or impure, normal or aberrant. As I have shown in my discussion of Burton's Anatomy, humoural science provided one of the ways early modern culture imagined different bodies in relation to one another, especially in terms of their precarious boundaries and vulnerable orifices. Douglas' broad, theoretical claim is thus particularly applicable in a culture where homology, correspondence and similitude form the conceptual basis for comprehending virtually all aspects of the world, including the physical body itself. This chapter proceeds from Douglas' linkage of corporal and figurative bodies to analyze the rhetoric of Bacon's “new science” in terms of the semiotics of female chastity in early modern England and the purity claimed on behalf of an aristocratic body whose boundaries were perceived as threatened. Baconian science and the language of its dissemination reside uneasily at the intersection of several discourses: the history of scientific investigation to which he responds, but also domestic relationships, female chastity, the endangered royal prerogative and the increasingly porous delineations of status.