Abstract

Seventeenth-century English prose has long been studied in its relation to the rhetorical tradition. The important scholarly works of Morris W. Croll, Richard Foster Jones, and George Williamson emphasized the classical form of the written period, and drew on classical sources from Cicero, Seneca, and Tacitus to show the degree to which authors like Justus Lipsius, Michel de Montaigne, and Sir Francis Bacon modeled their sentences on the "Attic" style first practiced in ancient Greece. This dissertation proposes to study the epistemological factors underlying such stylistic choices. ;These factors emerge from the ancient dispute between rhetoric and philosophy. Chapters 1 and 2 examine the dispute over style as represented in the essentialist philosophical theories of Plato and Aristotle on the one hand, and the "epistemic" philosophical theories of the sophists Gorgias, Protagoras, and Isocrates on the other. The sophists claim the rhetorical forms of style to be necessary for epistemological purposes, because knowledge can only be of the phenomenal things of the world, these things are unstable, and discourse is the means by which knowledge, though never certain, can be communicated and discussed. ;Many of the epistemological issues raised in the ancient controversy resurface in the development of English prose style during the seventeenth century. Sir Francis Bacon initiated the re-evaluation by setting magistral against probative forms of style. The probative borrows on many of the same conclusions reached by the sophists, and it is the style Bacon proposed for carrying on the true induction of his new scientific method. Baroque forms of prose and their epistemological openness are studied in the works of Sir Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, and Thomas Traherne. An important factor in the development of prose was science, especially the Royal Society. The artificial language movement, which involved Rene Descartes, Seth Ward, George Dalgarno, and John Wilkins, among others, was an effort to found style on the taxonomic ideals associated with Aristotelian essentialism. However, argument among Royal Society scientists over the nature and purpose of experimentation led to a prose useful for carrying out the kind of investigations into nature which have their epistemological roots in sophism