ABSTRACT
The essays in this volume present new insights into the complex interaction of science, literature, and rhetoric in the emergence of new types of knowledge about the natural and human worlds in the early modern period. Until relatively recently it was commonly assumed that literature and rhetoric were minor players in the development of distinctively modern approaches to knowledge. By contrast, participants in the socalled “Scientific Revolution” of the seventeenth century have taken centre stage in accounts of the distinctively new empirical methodologies and experimental techniques which are understood as leading directly to the knowledge society of our own age. This version of events has come to seem natural perhaps at least in part because of the success of the early modern natural philosophers in presenting “Real Knowledge” as that, and only that, which is established by mathematical and empirical proofs.1 viewed from this perspective, the more fluid ways we have of knowing about the world which are offered by cultural forms such as autobiography and fiction are apt to be dismissed as epistemologically unreliable.2
