Dalila, the Ulysses Myth, and Renaissance Allegorical Tradition

Steadman, John M.

doi:10.2307/3720469

Cited by 2 publications

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“…According to such critics, things were straightforward in the world and they become twisted 1 Cf. Steadman 1961, who interprets Spenser's personification of truth, Una, and the labyrinth as "logical contraries" because truth is unitary and the labyrinth is multiplex. Unitary falsehood would be the logical contrary of unitary truth.…”

Section: Wandering As a Strategic Deferral Of Truthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lost in the Woods: Francis Bacon’s Errant Pathways in Knowledge

Keller

2023

Errors, False Opinions and Defective Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

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Recovering Bacon’s valorization of error can shed light on his epistemology as a whole, and even on that of research more generally. Bacon is often known popularly as having established a scientific method to direct inquiry efficiently towards reliable knowledge and useful ends. In the period, however, experimentation already entailed husbanding resources and serving the useful ends of household management. By contrast, Bacon extended the length and sophistication of investigation in ways that deferred immediate use and that advised investigators to pursue bizarre and often resource-intensive approaches. Bacon supported what we would now call curiosity-driven research by encouraging investigators to wander in the pathways of error. Notably, however, he discussed error not in his interpretation of the myth of Daedalus, whose labyrinth commonly symbolized error, but rather in his reading of the myth of Proteus in which the investigator provokes matter (Proteus) into a state of error so that matter and its investigator might struggle together. For Bacon, rather than something to be escaped by following the clue of Ariadne, error was a state in which the human had to be immersed. In this way, Bacons reading of the myth of Proteus did gender experimentation, as Carolyn Merchant has argued, but not in the ways that Merchant claimed. By rejecting the useful and efficient forms of experimentation practiced by women within the household, Bacon made experimentation into a gendered, ongoing struggle through the valorization of error.

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Section: Wandering As a Strategic Deferral Of Truthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lost in the Woods: Francis Bacon’s Errant Pathways in Knowledge

Keller

2023

Errors, False Opinions and Defective Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

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“Speaking Pictures”: Ways of Seeing and Reading in English Renaissance Culture

Szőnyi

2018

Studia Anglica Posnaniensia

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Neither in Antiquity nor in the Middle Ages could literary theory settle the debate about the primacy of inspiration or imitation, Plato or Aristotle. It was in the Renaissance that serious efforts were made to reconcile the two theories, and one of the best syntheses came from England. Philosophical and aesthetical syncretism between Plato and Aristotle makes Sidney’s Defense of Poesie a non-dogmatic and particularly inspiring foundation for English literary theory. Also, Philip Sidney’s notion of “speaking pictures” needs to be revisited, in view of the ontology and epistemology of art, as a ground-breaking model for understanding the multimediality of cultural representations. The first part of the following essay is devoted to this. Furthermore, it will be examined how Sidney’s visual poetics influenced and at the same time represented emblematic ways of seeing and thinking in Elizabethan culture. These are particularly conspicuous in the influence of emblem theory in England and in Renaissance literary practice related to that. In the final section I intend to show that Shakespeare’s intriguing, although implicit, poetics is a telling example of how Renaissance visual culture enabled a model that put equal stress on inspiration and imitation, and also on the part of the audience, whose imagination had (and still has) to work in cooperation with the author’s intention.

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Dalila, the Ulysses Myth, and Renaissance Allegorical Tradition

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Lost in the Woods: Francis Bacon’s Errant Pathways in Knowledge

Lost in the Woods: Francis Bacon’s Errant Pathways in Knowledge

“Speaking Pictures”: Ways of Seeing and Reading in English Renaissance Culture

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