Abstract

Literate Experience argues for the existence of certain shared patterns of intellectual association in the English seventeenth century, patterns that follow the outlines of Bacon’s project of epistemological reform. Bacon’s project offered a theory of how knowing as a private act could be transformed into a public one, an act related to the creation and maintenance of public authority. The question thus becomes, how did thinkers in the period reimagine civil society as a polity of knowledge? This study traces out a variety of answers to that question, ranging from the Royal Society’s communal rhetoric to the work of four literary writers who, in a variety of ways, problematize the notion that political society exists as a community of shared knowledge.