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This chapter asserts the influence of Francis Bacon’s natural philosophy on the early modern English essay, noting in particular how the Baconian commitment to scientific experiment and empirical investigation informed the work of early essayists such as Robert Boyle, Samuel Hartlib, and William Cornwallis. The author argues that the humanist form of the essay was also harnessed to the practical and utilitarian ends of managed state capitalism, including agriculture and political economy.
Samuel Hartlib role was as an 'instrument' to render it public, and thereby of benefit to all. Technologia, the disposition of the arts and sciences in general, was the information science of the first half of the seventeenth century, the study of knowledge systems in the context of how we know what we know, and how we convey it to others. Hartlib described the technology thus: 'Hee aimes by it to gather All the Authors, their Notions or Axiomes and their whole discurses. It explains why Hartlib's London itineraries took him to the instrument makers of the city, the Deptford dockyards, the Rotherhithe 'glass-house', or the Kiiffler dye-works. Harold Love has already examined the nature and significance of scribal networks and scribal publication, describing Hartlib as one of the 'too few writers [who] published extensively in both media. It explained his interest in recipes for ink, new ways of blotting paper and new writing pens.
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