ABSTRACT
As with all historical figures, Harriot's identity has changed: changed with the changing programmes of historians, changed with their several perspectives, changed with their disciplinary outlooks. But most of all, Harriot's various personae have changed according to the diverse historiographical suppositions about the field of knowledge in the English Renaissance. The field of knowledge in Harriot's England was broader than modern fields, its ownership rights were less clearly demarcated, its cultivation had not yet been divided between the demands of increasingly specialized scientific domains. The field of knowledge, thus delineated, maps out much of the intellectual world that must have been familiar to Harriot, an Oxford graduate with a peculiar talent for mathematical problems and their practical applications. There are, of course, aspects of the Advice that betray the Earl's interest in non-Aristotelian science and mathematics, as well as subjects which do not fit either Aristotelianism or the 'new philosophy' and are relevant to Harriot's practices.
