One of the most humorous and visceral early modern satires, Joseph Hall’s Mundus Alter et Idem (1606?), parodied the corruption of the social and political order of sixteenth-century Europe, depicted in the new world of Terra Australis Incognita. Hall’s dystopia has traditionally been understood as a satire upon humanity’s moral perversion, and is often placed alongside other early modern parodies, such as Erasmus’ Praise of Folly. While this scholarship has added much to our understanding of Hall’s Mundus, this article argues (...) that Hall’s anxieties about corruption in the Mundus stem from his Protestant theological conception of the fundamental corruption of human reason. I argue that this anxiety about humanity’s cognitive abilities underlies Hall’s skepticism about travel. He doubted the veracity of travelers’ testimony, as well as the reliability and usefulness of the natural knowledge that could be discovered in the New World. (shrink)

Early modern natural philosophers such as Francis Bacon are frequently seen as providing a legitimating ideology for British imperial expansion. Although this has been challenged by one recent study, much of Bacon's work on English colonisation remains unexplored. This article argues that far from being an ideological apologist for English colonisation, Bacon had two sets of colonial anxieties. The first derived from a tradition of civic humanism which concerned the moral corruption, dispossession of indigenous people and the greed involved in (...) the British colonization of Ireland and America. Bacon's second anxiety was not moral but epistemological, and stemmed from his natural philosophy. For Bacon, colonies were not simply new commonwealths, they were places which potentially produced the natural knowledge vital for the recreation of man's original, epistemic empire over the world. Consequently, Bacon was not only interested in the morality of colonising, but also whether the knowledge produced in colonies was reliable. An exploration of Bacon's views on colonisation also offers us a point of entry into the scholarly debate about the relationship between Bacon's natural philosophy and his political thought. (shrink)

When historians and philosophers of science discuss instrumentality, they are primarily referring to an epistemological and metaphysical position that holds that science is concerned not with making truth claims but rather with predictability. Scholars correctly locate the origins of instrumental natural philosophy in the seventeenth century, when a drive toward the practical, applied study of nature transformed natural philosophy from a contemplative pursuit—so the story goes—into something more recognizably like modern science.I argue, however, that if we conceive of instrumentality primarily (...) in this way we neglect one of its crucial elements. Seventeenth-century arguments about instrumental, practical natural philosophy were not just methodological claims; they were also normative claims about what natural philosophy should be. When explored in its historical context, this drive toward instrumentality turns out to be a Protestant project to build the kingdom of Christ on earth, to improve mankind’s condition and reform the world. The seventeenth-century British colonies in North America provided a space to construe natural philosophy as a work of Christian charity, an endeavor that was useful to mankind. This article attempts to rethink our understanding of instrumentality by historicizing this concept in the early modern Atlantic context. (shrink)