Abstract
In The Battel of the Books Swift chose to enshrine the most recent quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns in a mock-heroic: a ‘terrible Fight’ between the books in the King’s Library (Tale, p. 146). The Battel was written whilst Swift was working as Temple’s secretary at Moor Park, and its intellectual context is firmly grounded in the debates of the 1690s, with a substantial number of its specific satiric targets directly related to what became a very personal feud. To demonstrate the superiority of Ancient writing, Temple had unfortunately picked the Epistles of Phalaris, the tyrant of Acragas, which the scholar, royal librarian and physico-theologian Richard Bentley (1662–1742) proved to be a forgery from a much later date, in a dissertation appended to the second edition of his friend Wotton’s Reflections (July 1697). Charles Boyle (1674–1731) of Christ Church, Oxford had prepared an edition of Phalaris to support Temple’s intellectual position and defend his personal reputation, and Bentley’s dissertation provoked several replies from the ‘Wits’ at Boyle’s college, the most significant being the collaborative Dr. Bentley’s Dissertations […] Examin’d (February 1698), published under Boyle’s name. Composition of the Battel probably started after Swift read Bentley’s Dissertation and must have continued at least until after the publication of the Christ Church Examin’d, a work of ‘great Learning and Wit’ according to the ‘Bookseller’ (p. 141).
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Notes
A. C. Elias, Jr, Swift at Moor Park: Problems in Biography and Criticism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), p. 48.
In contrast, see Philip Pinkus, ‘Swift and the Ancients-Moderns Controversy’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 29 (1959), 46–58 (p. 51).
The episode has been extensively discussed. See esp. The Battle of the Books: Eine Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Hermann J. Real (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1978), pp. xlv–liv.
See Ehrenpreis, I, 232–34, Hermann J. Real, ‘Die Biene und die Spinne in Swift’s “Battle of the Books”’, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, n.s.23 (1973), 169–77, and Roberta F. Borkat, ‘The Spider and the Bee: Jonathan Swift’s Reversal of Tradition in The Battle of the Books’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 3 (December 1976), 44–46.
Bacon, Novum organum, Book I, Aphorism XCV, in The Instauratio magna Part II: Novum organum and Associated Texts, ed. and trans. Graham Rees with Maria Wakely (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), p. 153, and The Advancement of Learning, ed. Michael Kiernan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 24.
See David K. Weiser, ‘Bacon’s Borrowed Imagery’, Review of English Studies, n.s.38 (1987), 315–24 (pp. 316–18), James W. Johnson, ‘That Neo-Classical Bee’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 22 (1961), 262–66,
R. H. Bowers, ‘Bacon’s Spider Simile’, Journal for the History of Ideas, 17 (1956), 133–35,
and Jonathan Woolfson, ‘The Renaissance of Bees’, Renaissance Studies, 24 (2009), 281–300 (p. 283). The bee’s liberty to roam and to produce honey also served as a metaphor for the occasional meditator’s freedom to expatiate upon any given topic:
see Marie-Louise Coolahan, ‘Redeeming Parcels of Time: Aesthetics and Practice of Occasional Meditation’, The Seventeenth Century, 22 (2007), 124–43 (pp. 131–32).
See Ernest Tuveson, ‘Swift and the World-Makers’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 11 (1950), 54–74 (p. 69), Kathleen Williams, ‘Restoration Themes in the Major Satires of Swift’, Review of English Studies, n.s.16 (1965), 258–71 (p. 261), and Borkat, ‘The Spider and the Bee’, p. 45.
‘An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning’, in Five Miscellaneous Essays by Sir William Temple, ed. Samuel Holt Monk (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1963), p. 37. See Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 19–26.
See esp. Roy Porter, ‘Creation and Credence: The Career of Theories of the Earth in Britain, 1660–1820’, in Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientific Culture, ed. Barry Barnes (Beverley Hills, CA: Sage, 1979), pp. 97–123,
Joseph M. Levine, Dr. Woodward’s Shield: History, Science, and Satire in Augustan England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 25–27,
Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1959), pp. 225–70,
and H. V. S. Ogden, ‘Thomas Burnet’s Telluris Theoria Sacra and Mountain Scenery’, ELH, 14 (1947), 139–50 (esp. pp. 139, 148). On the Scriblerian attack on Woodward, see esp. Levine, Dr. Woodward’s Shield, passim,
Lester M. Beattie, John Arbuthnot: Mathematician and Satirist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935), pp. 190–262, and Memoirs, pp. 203–206, 330.
Burnet, Theory, Book III, Chap. 10, p. 56, and Book III, Chap. 12, pp. 73, 74. See Margaret C. Jacob and W. A. Lockwood, ‘Political Millenarianism and Burnet’s Sacred Theory’, Science Studies, 2 (1972), 265–79 (p. 273),
Ernest Lee Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia: A Study in the Background of the Idea of Progress (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949; repr. New York: Harper & Row, 1964), pp. 117–20,
and Reiner Smolinski, ‘The Logic of Millenial Thought: Sir Isaac Newton among his Contemporaries’, in Newton and Religion: Context, Nature, and Influence, eds James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1999), pp. 259–89 (pp. 267–68).
Richard Steele, The Spectator, 146 (17 August 1711), in The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), II, 76–77. See Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, passim.
See Scott Mandelbrote, ‘Isaac Newton and Thomas Burnet: Biblical Criticism and the Crisis of Late Seventeenth-Century England’, in The Books of Nature and Scripture: Recent Essays on Natural Philosophy, Theology, and Biblical Criticism in the Netherlands of Spinoza’s Time and the British Isles of Newton’s Time, eds James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1994), pp. 149–78 (pp. 151, 157),
and James E. Force, ‘Providence and Newton’s Pantokrator: Natural Law, Miracles, and Newtonian Science’, in Newton and Newtonianism: New Studies, eds Force and Sarah Hutton (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2004), pp. 65–92 (p. 65).
See Richard W. F. Kroll, The Material Word: Literate Culture in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 122–23.
Appendix to Archaeologiae Philosophicae, trans. and published in Charles Blount, The Oracles of Reason (London, 1693), p. 80. See Tuveson, ‘Swift and the World-makers’, p. 65, and Kathleen Williams, Jonathan Swift and the Age of Compromise (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1958), p. 128.
A Representation of the Present State of Religion, with regard to the late Excessive Growth of Infidelity, Heresy, and Profaneness (London, 1711), pp. 16–17. See LRJS, I, 102–105. On Atterbury’s authorship, see Larry Stewart, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 92.
See Hermann J. Real, ‘“An Horrid Vision”: Jonathan Swift’s “(On) the Day of Judgment”’, in Swift and his Contexts, eds John Irwin Fischer, Hermann J. Real and James Woolley (New York: AMS Press, 1989), pp. 65–96.
Anita Guerrini, ‘The Tory Newtonians: Gregory, Pitcairne, and their Circle’, Journal of British Studies, 25 (1986), 288–311 (pp. 305–10).
Atterbury to Bishop Jonathan Trelawny, 15 June 1704, in Memoirs and Correspondence of Francis Atterbury, D. D., Bishop of Rochester, ed. Robert Folkestone Williams, 2 vols (London: W. H. Allen, 1869), I, 99, 100.
See Ian Higgins, Swift’s Politics: A Study in Disaffection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), esp. p. 141.
See Margaret C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1720 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976), esp. pp. 78–79,
Howard D. Weinbrot, ‘“He Will Kill Me Over and Over Again”: Intellectual Contexts of the Battle of the Books’, in Reading Swift: Papers from the Fourth Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift, eds Hermann J. Real and Helgard Stöver-Leidig (München: Fink, 2003), pp. 225–48 (esp. p. 236), and Guerrini, ‘The Tory Newtonians’, pp. 289, 307. Charles Boyle and Freind would find themselves in the Tower at the time of the Atterbury affair in 1723, but Freind later served as physician to Caroline
(J. S. Rowlinson, ‘John Freind: Physician, Chemist, Jacobite, and Friend of Voltaire’s’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 61 [2007], 109–27 [p. 116]).
J. E. McGuire and P. M. Rattansi, ‘Newton and the “Pipes of Pan”’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 21 (1966), 108–43 (pp. 115, 121). See also James E. Force, ‘Newton, the “Ancients,” and the “Moderns”’, in Newton and Religion, pp. 237–57 (pp. 243–44).
‘Memoirs, Relating to That Change Which Happened in the Queen’s Ministry in the Year 1710’ (c.1714, pub.1765), in PW, VIII, 120. See Ian Higgins, ‘Jonathan Swift’s Political Confession’, in Politics and Literature in the Age of Swift: English and Irish Perspectives, ed. Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 3–30.
See Robert M. Adams, ‘The Mood of the Church and A Tale of a Tub’, in England in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century: Essays on Culture and Society, ed. H. T. Swedenberg, Jr (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 71–99 (p. 84), the same author’s ‘In Search of Baron Somers’, in Culture and Politics from Puritanism to the Enlightenment, ed. Perez Zagorin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 165–202 (p. 186), and Higgins, Swift’s Politics, esp. pp. 8, 34, 101, 114, 122–24, 129. For J. A. Downie, Swift always maintained his ‘Old Whig’ principles: see Jonathan Swift: Political Writer (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984; repr. 1985), esp. pp. 83–84.
See Margaret C. Jacob, ‘Millenarianism and Science in the Late Seventeenth Century’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 37 (1976), 335–41 (p. 335),
Simon Schaffer, ‘Halley’s Atheism and the End of World’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 32 (1977), 17–40 (p. 19), and
Robert Markley, Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660–1740 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 206. Unlike Keill, Swift’s future friend Arbuthnot was more willing to entertain theorists who surveyed the ‘Works of Nature with the same Geometry (tho’ in a more imperfect Degree) by which the Divine Architect put them together’, although he wouldn’t have included Burnet and Woodward among them. See An Examination of Dr. Woodward’s Account of the Deluge (1697), repr. in The Miscellaneous Works of the Late Dr. Arbuthnot, 2 vols (Glasgow, 1751), II, 235.
John Keill, An Examination of Dr Burnet’s Theory of the Earth. Together with Some Remarks on Mr Whiston’s New Theory of the Earth (London, 1698), p. 37. For less prominent responses, see Mandelbrote, ‘Isaac Newton and Thomas Burnet’, p. 171n32. Descartes’ eschatology had also influenced Burnet’s onetime acquaintance, Henry More, whose An Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness (1660) explained that the conflagration would be brought about through physical means, in the form of volcanoes and comets. See Philip C. Almond, Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 114.
Tale, p. 108. On Descartes in the Tale, see Michael R. G. Spiller, ‘The Idol of the Stove: The Background to Swift’s Criticism of Descartes’, Review of English Studies, 25 (1974), 15–24,
Miriam Kosh Starkman, Swift’s Satire on Learning in ‘A Tale of a Tub’ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950; repr. New York: Octagon Books, 1968), pp. 32–34,
Phillip Harth, Swift and Anglican Rationalism: The Religious Background of ‘A Tale of a Tub’ (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 94–97,
and Roger D. Lund, ‘Strange Complicities: Atheism and Conspiracy in A Tale of a Tub’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 13: 3 (November 1989), 34–58;
repr. in British Literature 1640–1789: A Critical Reader, ed. Robert DeMaria, Jr (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 142–68 (p. 152).
See Jos Luisé Bermúdez, ‘Scepticism and Science in Descartes’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 57 (1997), 743–72 (p. 744).
See, for instance, Discourse on the Method (1637), Part I, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–91), I, 112.
Temple, ‘Some Thoughts upon Reviewing the Essay’, p. 73, and John Boyle, Fifth Earl of Cork and Orrery, Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift, ed. João Fróes (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), p. 207 (Letter XIV).
See Steven Shapin, Never Pure (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), pp. 142–81.
Brean S. Hammond, Pope (Brighton: Harvester New Readings, 1986), p. 107.
John Traugott, ‘A Tale of a Tub’, in The Character of Swift’s Satire: A Revised Focus, ed. C. J. Rawson (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983), pp. 83–126 (pp. 94–95). For Elias, however, the Spider highlights the ‘traits which Temple unwittingly shared with the Moderns he despised’ (Swift at Moor Park, p. 192).
On the interpretation of Swift’s allegories, see esp. Brean S. Hammond, ‘Applying Swift’, in Reading Swift: Papers from the Second Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift, eds Richard H. Rodino and Hermann J. Real (München: Fink, 1993), pp. 185–97.
Brean S. Hammond, ‘Scriblerian Self-Fashioning’, Yearbook of English Studies, 18 (1988), 108–24 (p. 109).
See Roger D. Lund, ‘A Tale of a Tub, Swift’s Apology, and the Trammels of Christian Wit’, in Augustan Subjects: Essays in Honor of Martin C. Battestin, ed. Albert J. Rivero (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997), pp. 87–109 (esp. pp. 88–90).
Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, 1651–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 59.
See Donald Greene, ‘Augustinianism and Empiricism: A Note on Eighteenth-Century English Intellectual History’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 1 (1967), 33–68 (pp. 54–55),
and Greene, ‘Swift: Some Caveats’, in Studies in the Eighteenth Century II: Papers presented at the Second David Nichol Smith Memorial Seminar Canberra 1970, ed. R. F. Brissenden (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1973), pp. 341–58 (p. 355).
Samuel Butler, Hudibras, Part I, Canto III, ll. 1337–40, in Hudibras Parts I and II and Selected Other Writings, eds John Wilders and Hugh de Quehen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 101.
See, for instance, Colin Kiernan, ‘Swift and Science’, Historical Journal, 14 (1971), 709–22,
and Richard G. Olson, ‘Tory-High Church Opposition to Science and Scientism in the Eighteenth Century: The Works of John Arbuthnot, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Johnson’, in The Uses of Science in the Age of Newton, ed. John G. Burke (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 171–204.
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Lynall, G. (2012). Sinking the ‘Spider’s Cittadel’: The Battel of the Books and Thomas Burnet’s ‘Philosophical Romance’ of the Earth. In: Swift and Science. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137016966_3
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