Introduction: Altitudes of Authority

Abstract

So Abraham Cowley, in his ode ‘To the Royal Society’, romantically figures Francis Bacon’s reformation of natural philosophy as the overthrow of the tyranny of scholastic learning. During the seventeenth century, the authority of the ancients had been challenged by new experimental and empirical methodologies far removed from the ‘Magick’ in Cowley’s paradoxical metaphor. Despite the ode’s claims, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the new natural philosophy had not yet established supremacy: many rival narratives of nature competed for cultural acceptance. This book examines the ways in which Jonathan Swift, writing at this time of great transition, engaged with developments in knowledge of the external observable world, and with the culture of scientific discovery and practice, including the textual transmission of ideas. More particularly, the study focuses upon the theological, political and socio-cultural resonances of scientific knowledge in the early eighteenth century, and considers what they tell us about Swift’s literary strategies and the growth of his often satiric imagination.

Authority, which did a Body boast,

Though ’twas but Air condens’d, and stalk’d about,

Like some old Giants more Gigantic Ghost;

To terrifie the Learned Rout

With the plain Magick of true Reasons Light,

He chac’d out of our sight.¹