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Chapter 4 - ‘Those Fruits of Natural knowledge’

Taste and the Early Royal Society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 October 2020

Elizabeth L. Swann
Elizabeth L. Swann
Affiliation:
Durham University
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Summary

This chapter investigates taste’s paramount importance to the production and legitimisation of experimental knowledge by early Royal Society members, including Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and Nehemiah Grew. Early scientists attempted to classify the properties of substances by reference to their flavours; in so doing, they aimed to develop medicines and technologies that could return humankind to prelapsarian felicity. Their efforts chime with Royal Society propaganda, which depicts taxonomical tasting as an inversion of Adam and Eve’s catastrophic gustation. Research into taste as a physiological process, however, presented gustation as subjective, disrupting the link between taste and objective knowledge that undergirded this rhetoric.

Keywords

tastesensesempiricismexperimentmicroscopeRoyal SocietyRobert HookeRobert BoyleAntoni van LeeuwenhoekNehemiah Grew
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Chapter
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Taste and Knowledge in Early Modern England , pp. 144 - 182
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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