The Invention of Discovery, 1500–1700

The early modern period used to be known as the Age of Discovery. More recently, it has been troped as an age of invention. But was the invention/discovery binary itself invented, or discovered? This volume investigates the possibility that it was invented, through a range of early modern knowledge practices, centered on the emergence of modern natural science. From Bacon to Galileo, from stagecraft to math, from martyrology to romance, contributors to this interdisciplinary collection examine the period's generation of discovery as an absolute and ostensibly neutral standard of knowledge-production. They further investigate the hermeneutic implications for the epistemological authority that tends, in modernity, still to be based on that standard. The Invention of Discovery, 1500-1700 is a set of attempts to think back behind discovery, considered as a decisive trope for modern knowledge.

Contents: Introduction: the invention of discovery, 1500-1700, James Dougal Fleming; 'That full-sail voyage': travel narratives and astronomical discovery in Kepler and Galileo, Piers Brown; Francis Bacon and the divine hierarchy of nature, Steven Matthews; 'Invention' and 'discovery' as modes of conceptual integration: the case of Thomas Harriot, Michael Booth; The undiscoverable country: occult qualities, scholasticism, and the end of nescience, James Dougal Fleming; Spirits, vitality, and creation in the poetics of Tomasso Campanella and John Donne, Anthony Russell; Perfection of the world and mathematics in late 16th-century Copernican cosmologies, Pietro Daniel Omodeo; Discovery in The World: the case of Descartes, Jacqueline Wernimont; Numbering martyrs: numerology, encyclopedism, and the invention of immanent events in John Foxe's Actes and Monuments, Ryan Netzley; Unearthing radical reform: antiquarianism against discovery, Travis DeCook; The discovery of blackness in the early modern bed-trick, Louise Denmead; Newness and discovery in early-modern France, Vincent Masse; Afterword: the art of the field, James Dougal Fleming; Bibliography; Index.

James Dougal Fleming is Associate Professor of English at Simon Fraser University, Canada. He is also the author of Milton's Secrecy: And Philosophical Hermeneutics (Ashgate, 2008).