Dr%20Kathryn%20Murphy: List of publications

At the midpoint of his Treatie of Humane Learning, a long poem on the scope of human knowledge and the branches of the arts, Fulke Greville issues a self-scuppering precept: For Sciences from Nature should be drawne, As Arts from practise, neuer out of Bookes. This appears shortly after a turn from a sceptical catalogue of the failures of human intellection in a fallen world, and the inadequacy and futility of art, to a more constructive vision of the possibilities of pragmatic action and limited knowledge. The epistemological pessimism of the first sixty-one stanzas is partially salved by a turn from theory to practice. But Greville's spurning of what can be learned from literature is of course a paradox. His overt rejection of theory appears within a didactic treatise. That rules should not be drawn from books is itself a rule in a book.

Robert Burton called his period ‘this scribling age’, in which the copiousness of printed matter and the multitude of authors caused problems both of discernment – how to distinguish true scholars from intellectual quacks? – and of quantity: how can the scholar hope to master the ‘vast Chaos and confusion of Bookes’? This article addresses Burton's engagement with these questions, and examines both his attempt to establish a polymathic persona, and the relationship of the Anatomy to other compendious genres of the period. Section II of this essay compares Burton's versions of polymathy with Johannes Wower's De polymathia tractatio (1603), showing how, in both the Anatomy and his academic play, Philosophaster, Burton contrasts the true polymath with the figure of the ‘polypragmatist’, representing a kind of miscellaneous learning which is shallow, deceptive, and mercenary. The third section examines Burton's relationship to another model of disciplinary multifariousness: the encyclopaedia, understood by Burton not as a genre, but as an ethos. In the fourth section, attention turns to polyantheas and other compendious literary genres. Burton's complaints about such shortcuts to learning are shown to participate in the controversy over the scholarly method which followed the publication of John Selden's Historie of Tithes (1618). The final section addresses polymathic style: Burton's ambiguous relationship to Erasmian copia, and the struggle to find a voice amid the clamour of citations demanded of the scholar.

Tracing its emergence in various fields, the contributions in this volume demonstrate how the notion of impartiality is intimately implicated in epochal early modern shifts in epistemology and science, religious and political discourse, ...

This volume of essays on Thomas Browne aims to set the man and his works in new contexts.