joanna picciotto, labors of innocence in early modern england

Joanna Picciotto , Labors of Innocence in Early Modern EnglandLabors of Innocence in Early Modern England by Joanna PicciottoReview by: Neil ForsythModern Philology, Vol. 111, No. 2 (November 2013), pp. E202-E208Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/671955 .

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B O O K R E V I E W

Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England. Joanna Picciotto. Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Pp. viiiþ863.

This is an enormous, richly detailed, often rewarding, but also dense anddifficult book. I confess that my heart sank when I saw its size and felt itsweight. It has 591 pages of text, and the endnotes go on until page 766.There follow another eighty pages of bibliography. And I read slowly. Ithought I had written a big book or two myself, but I am now hiding in acocked hat. The book evidently started life as a dissertation, where itsexpansiveness might have been a virtue, and has now been published byone of the most prestigious university presses. It is beautifully designed andpresented. The back cover displays endorsements and high praise fromwell-known scholars. But who is likely to read it? For whom is it written? It ismerely, I fear, for fellow laborers—fit perhaps, but few. That would be ashame. It has been years in the writing and is laden with careful, meticu-lous, and sometimes surprising research results. The subject is fascinating,and the ideas often brilliant. I will point to a few of them, and there aremany, many more that the space of a review, even a long one, cannotadmit. It is, in the best and the worst senses, an academic book. The treat-ment, if rarely tedious, is so complex that the meaning is at times very hardto make out and even, I am sorry to say, eludes my understanding.

The book brings together, and argues for their intimate relation, two‘‘myths’’ (a word nowhere defined) of modernity. One is a political ideaabout the state of nature as the ground of popular sovereignty (no gentle-man where Adam delved); the other is about nature as ontologicallybefore—and radically different from—humanity’s ‘‘fallen’’ experience ofit. Paradise is here, if you can only see it. (That is simplified reviewer-speak.) Both myths took a grip on the imagination of the seventeenth cen-tury, and the central figure in this intellectual revolution is Bacon, or rather

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Baconianism: the central idea is that, in order to perceive the world accu-rately, we need to recover the innocent eye of Adam. The author, JoannaPicciotto, writes that ‘‘Bacon redeemed curiosity from its association withoriginal sin: associated with investigative labor rather than appetite, thefirst sin became the first virtue’’ (3). Those last few words make a fine apho-rism. The repetition of ‘‘association’’/‘‘associated’’ within four words is a tri-fle inelegant, perhaps, but occasional clumsiness (‘‘rationally reconstructthe rationale,’’ another instance [524]) is hardly surprising in such a vastbook. But a few more pithy aphorisms would have been welcome.

‘‘Experimentalism’’ has been a much-studied topic in recent years. KarenEdwards, for example, has shown that Milton was much more aware of mod-ern developments in science, especially Baconian experimentalism, thanhad been admitted by earlier historians of science such as Kester Svendson.This new book differs in at least two important respects from Edwards. Firstof all, it ranges widely across the whole long century, well beyond Milton.Second, it explores in extraordinary detail the way Adam’s experience inEden became a template for understanding the world as the new sciencewas making it known. It needs to be a big book, perhaps, because the proj-ect is so vast. An incomplete list of the writers discussed includes GerrardWinstanley, John Evelyn, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Thomas Sprat,Andrew Marvell, William Davenant, John Locke, Daniel Defoe, JosephAddison, Richard Steele, Celia Fiennes, and above all John Milton.

Picciotto reimagines the seventeenth century (and on into the eigh-teenth) as if it were permeated almost everywhere with examples of experi-mentalism (a word that occurs so often I came to dread its next appear-ance), all more or less following in the steps of the originating figure, SirFrancis Bacon. These experimentalists can be so numerous because theystand for so many different concepts, all imperiously grouped under theexperimentalist label—not only empiricism but the very possibility of objec-tive knowledge, indeed the sacralization of labor itself, both scientific andliterary, the work of ‘‘truth production’’ (88). At one end of the spectrumlies the Puritan concept of ‘‘experimental faith’’; at the other, the Baconianfaith in scientific experiment (4), of which Robert Boyle is a recurring rep-resentative. On the way across that spectrum, we meet what are made intorelated ideas: Habermas’s public sphere, moved back into the midcenturyand deprived of its secularist and individualist force; productive labor moregenerally; the soul/body distinction; figurations of Adam from the revolt of1381 down to and on past the Restoration; the image of Eden as an inno-cent and experimentalist paradise; the history and working ideals of theRoyal Society; as well as detailed literary analyses of ‘‘experimentalist’’ liter-ary texts from Donne all the way to Steele and the Spectator.

Thus, science and literature are not separated off from each other intowhat C. P. Snow called the two cultures, or not yet: rather, they are related

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or complementary ways of getting at the truth. Swift made the virtuosi, asthey are generally called here (natural philosophers, scientists), into ob-jects of satire—the inhabitants of Lagoda whose distrust of language leadsthem to communicate by exchange of heavy burdens of things in them-selves. But to be objects of satire is not the main service that experimental-ists offer literature: rather, they both exploit a whole range of metaphorsthat attack in various ways ‘‘idolatrous fancies of the mind’’ (17). A keyresult is that ‘‘pamphleteers, poets, and periodical writers fashioned a newimage of the author as a productive spectator: one who serves the public byextending the realm of the visible’’ (14). The century produced a new idealof the professional observer, whether experimental scientist, theologian,or poet, who could now produce new truths through new ways of seeing.

Literature is an instrument of discovery since it offers new experiences,just as did Bacon’s idea of how knowledge is produced—by process. Diverseas all these many figures may be, they are linked, says Picciotto, by ‘‘a unityof intention,’’ by ‘‘sensuous iconoclasm, the collectivization of authorship,and a refusal to conclude’’ (16). This little list may suggest why the book isso long and why it has so much trouble identifying its target. When we actu-ally get to the discussion of those abstractions, it is often fascinating, but thereader has a lot of work to do, and many will give up, as I was more thanonce tempted to do.

The most important of all the ideas that link these various experimental-ist worlds together is ‘‘a shared Adamic epistemology.’’ What this means isthat the century as a whole shifted the emphasis from Eve’s act of punish-able curiosity to Adam’s naming of the creatures (Gen. 2:19) as the primalscene of discovery. Bacon and the rest of his army thus redeemed curiosityfrom its association with original sin. Instead, it was linked with investigativelabor. As Picciotto well puts it, ‘‘The first sin became the first virtue’’ (3).This radical rewriting of the Genesis story took some doing, and the bookleaves nothing out in its own act of productive labor to recount how it hap-pened. As we read on, engaging in what the author apparently thinks of,shamelessly, as our own necessary labor, we hear about the image of theintellectual as a public worker as well as, in a more directly Adamic sense,an ideal laborer, the precursor of the delvers and diggers. The ideal of thisspecial work can be carried out in the laboratory or in the field, beyondclass barriers and creating the idea of an English public ‘‘as a result of En-gland’s revolutionary moment’’ (24). Another conventional distinction isalso transcended, that between active and contemplative pursuits. The sci-entist recovers the theologically innocent eye of Adam. Eden is no longer ahortus conclusus. It can be reentered.

Purgatory disappears from the mythology but stays in the vocabulary, animportant, even exciting, idea. It becomes ‘‘the fiery trial by which men areclensed from their corruptions’’ (106). Drawing on Stephen Greenblatt’s

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Hamlet in Purgatory (2001), in which he discusses a fifteenth-century manu-script illumination that depicts an Adamic peasant with a hoe who is either‘‘working the field or digging a grave,’’ and in either case a delver, Picciottoargues for a link ‘‘between purgation and labor, between the trial by fireand the trial of work’’ (107). Milton’s removal of a Dantean purgatory fromParadise Lost does not indicate its disappearance but rather ‘‘an expansionof its functions’’ (108). Labor itself became what one reviewer (TaheiHanada on H-Net; http://www.h-net.org/) called, in a fine alliterativephrase, a ‘‘Protestant paradise of purgatorial pains.’’

One of the most interesting sections of the book elaborates Spratt’sdescription of the Royal Society as ‘‘a union of eyes and hands.’’ The keypoint, one that takes on a political allure as the argument proceeds, is thatthe nobility and the gentry have ‘‘condescended to labour here with theirhands.’’ The aims of this representative body required it to invite ‘‘the vul-gar’’ to join. One foreign visitor remarked that the society was filled with‘‘none but apothecaries and other such people who know scarce a word ofLatin’’ (156). Indeed Boyle took pride in having ‘‘illiterate Persons’’ as histeachers and drew extensively from ‘‘the information accumulated bymetallurgists, dyers, and distillers’’ (161).

The book’s argument also depends on something called the spectatorialbody. This turns out to mean the collective labor of experimentalists as theyinvestigate the world together. ‘‘In practice, the spectatorial body was recov-ered as his own body, improved by artificial enhancements, disciplined bynew evidentiary canons, absorbed into a collective subject of knowledgeproduction, and directed to spiritual ends’’ (20). Many instances of suchgroups working together are explored, including the Hartlib circle andGresham College, and then in a very interesting way, the idea is related toParadise Lost. Adam and Eve are supposed to work together, as Adam doesindeed point out during their quarrel, and Satan sees them imparadised bytheir union. Even more interesting is the way that Picciotto represents theconversation of Raphael and Adam as a kind of philosophers’ conference(the word is used only here, as an observant footnote points out: hellishconclaves are parliamentary or ecclesiastical gatherings or consults). Theirconversation is the ‘‘homosocial philosopher’s paradise of which experi-mentalists dreamed.’’ What is more, it is Adam’s curiosity that promotes theconference: ‘‘sudden mind arose / In Adam, not to let th’ occasion pass,’’exactly as Boyle and other contemporaries recommend, to lay hold on cir-cumstantial occasions to explore and experiment (471). The chance to findout something important also inspired the group nature of the Royal Soci-ety practice. The Restoration coffeehouse could reflect the same spirit, andthe newly emerging periodicals were a virtual equivalent.

An important topic that recurs throughout the book is the lens (one ofthe period’s many ‘‘prostheses,’’ another word I got pretty tired of ) as a way

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of seeing beyond the surface of nature: experimentalists are to be foundusing their lenses all over the century, and the book. Galileo, of course, butalso Boyle, Marvell, Milton, Locke, and Dryden, down to the Spectator, wereall together using what Picciotto calls an ‘‘anti-fictional alternative to themimetic mirror’’ (323), an instrument of empirical demystification thatallows the garden of Eden itself, especially its flowers, to be treated as a lens.You must enjoy, and understand, for yourselves the part about how flowersbecome a lens. A brief (for once) discussion of M. H. Abrams’s terms sug-gests that a revised understanding of his formative metaphors of culturalhistory would now offer us the lens, the mirror, and the lamp. Once you cansee through the lens (telescope or microscope), you discover that the worldis fallen only at the misunderstood surface: beneath is the world of natureas it truly is—and was in Paradise. Indeed, it is as it is in Paradise since it hasnever really been lost, even in Milton. Cromwell’s chaplain Peter Sterry cele-brated ‘‘the primitive image of pure Nature sparkling through the Rubbish,’’by which he means the confusions of the present state of affairs. The proemto The Great Instauration proposes as its project that ‘‘trial should be made,whether that commerce between the mind of man and the nature ofthings . . . might by any means be restored to its perfect and original condi-tion, or if that may not be, yet reduced to a better condition than that inwhich it now is.’’ This original, undamaged nature of Adam distinguishesitself from, for example, ‘‘a Hobbesian state of nature’’ (304).

Once Picciotto begins to explore the literature of the period, she intro-duces the portmanteau notion of a ‘‘textacle,’’ that is, a truth-producingrather than fictional text. Chapter 5 offers an extended reading of AndrewMarvell’s The Last Instructions to a Painter (1667), showing how Marvell’s satir-ical scheme exploits the experimentalist ‘‘model of virtual witnessing’’—orthe technological resonance between print and lens—to discount state pro-paganda (327); Marvellian dissent is no longer partisan but ‘‘rational,’’ lay-ing bare through its literary lens ‘‘the causes of both the Dutch naval victoryat Medway and the crisis of political representation in Charles II’s England.’’The satire ‘‘enacts a whole experimentalist politico-poetics’’ (344). It beginswith the microscope and ends with the telescope and, in the process,abolishes the ‘‘metaphysical necessity of kingship’’ (353). Somehow Dry-den’s Essay of Dramatic Poesie lays out a parallel aesthetic experimentalism,whereas Davenant’s Gondibert just does not work that way. It is a malfunc-tioning textacle, a failed Baconian epic.

Milton’s is a successful one. Picciotto reads Paradise Lost, indeed all ofMilton, as if it grew directly out of Areopagitica and Of Education, with itsfamous definition of the end of learning as ‘‘to repair the ruins of our firstparents.’’ Experimentalism, says Picciotto, is everywhere in Milton’s earlierworks: the haemony of Comus, that mysterious simple found by a shepherdboy, is even more mysteriously ‘‘a synecdoche of an ongoing sacrament of




knowledge production’’ (414), while those ‘‘blind mouths’’ of Lycidas areguilty of refusing intellectual labor of the kind promoted by the Baconians.In Paradise Lost, the periodic syntax, the enjambed lines, are ‘‘signs ofexperimentalist progress’’ (439). Adam and Eve have to work to keep downthe garden’s wanton growth: in one of many acute insights, Picciotto pointsto the contrast between a linear logic of improvement and chiasmus, nicelycalled ‘‘a figure for getting nowhere,’’ in ‘‘Thir growing work: for much thirwork outgrew / The hands dispatch of two gardning so wide’’ (9.202–3).Eve comes off rather badly in Picciotto’s view. One might have thought shewas the archempiricist, in her desire to know and her appeal to ‘‘experi-ence, . . . best guide’’ (9. 807–8) or in her desire to separate to get the workdone better. But no, her problem is that she is both a sensualist and an indi-vidualist, a solitary worker who cannot stand the collective enterprise or‘‘corporate productivity.’’ She is ‘‘a zealous but incompetent natural philos-opher’’ (475). Interestingly enough, this is a rare (only?) place in the bookwhere the reader, who regularly gets the pronoun ‘‘she,’’ is assumed to be a‘‘he’’ (482).

Reading the poem through the template of Baconian ideas rather ironsout much of the subtler kinds of ambivalence. One might not guess, forexample, how in a famous passage Raphael is made to hesitate betweenPtolemaic and Copernican systems. For Picciotto, this is simply a sign ofMilton’s heightened experimentalism. Such ‘‘demonstrations of intellec-tual forbearance’’ are no more than ‘‘proud assertions of his commitmentto an innocent investigative style’’ (462). This is part of a much larger argu-ment about how the poem becomes itself an instrument of discovery, allow-ing its readers to find out what the world is like but not making dogmaticstatements of its own. The poem is ‘‘Galileo’s literary equivalent’’ (436).Thus, what is called the ‘‘primal scene’’ of Adam naming the animals getsonly a few lines. That might have posed a difficulty for Picciotto’s argu-ment, but no, it strengthens it: ‘‘Instead of merely representing this scene,Milton magnified it, dilating the work of Genesis 2:19 almost beyond thescope of the poem’s narrative. . . . Milton, like Hooke, sought to render na-ture’s book through its ‘orthography’ and ‘grammar,’ extending readinginto the processes that form the substrate of the visible world’’ (491).

The ideas of experimentalism are traced on into Paradise Regained andSamson Agonistes, which is given what Picciotto calls ‘‘an absurdly pacifistreading’’ based somehow on a reading of the final simile of the ‘‘eveningDragon’’ as the process of secularization. Whether this is absurd, I cannottell, for I simply do not understand the argument. The book then leads uson into the eighteenth century, when a new generation of medical andtravel writers like Celia Fiennes urged opening one’s world to wide spacesand ‘‘pursued a fitness program in the spirit of public service’’ (527). Thesection on Fiennes is one of the best parts of the book: it is clear and

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uncomplicated, and we see readily why she is in the book. She goes aroundthe country trying out different wells and comparing their effects, explain-ing that this one has no effect because it lacks minerals and that one is coldand refreshing and ‘‘shuts up the pores of the body immediately’’ (538).She is an instance of that ‘‘rational use of baths’’ (524) that two otherexperimentalists had proposed. She tried her hand at spinning glass andtested the ‘‘Whispering Place’’ of Gloucester Cathedral, explaining that it isnot so remarkable as the one at Montague House, where the sound is car-ried along the high vaulted ceiling. The discussion of Defoe’s Tour that fol-lows is also splendid. Defoe, we learn, was the first of the literary virtuosi Pic-ciotto discusses to have been trained as an experimentalist in the academyof Charles Morton.

Oddly enough, the era of experimentalism finally came to an endthrough Isaac Newton. His individualist and antisocial ideas, akin to theoccult secrets that he alone seemed to understand, brought back the ban-ished priest in a new guise. Given the emergent cult of genius, to which hisprestige contributed, recovery of paradise was now ‘‘beside the point.’’

On page 389 of this immensely long book, Picciotto writes, ‘‘My autopsyof this poem will be brief.’’ I greeted those words with a sigh of relief. Butthe ‘‘autopsy’’ as she calls her analysis of Davenant’s Gondibert goes on forten pages. Brevity is in the eye of the beholder.

Neil ForsythUniversite de Lausanne




joanna picciotto, labors of innocence in early modern england

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