Stylistic reform in seventeenth-century British writing

Abstract

My dissertation explores the conflict between occult and newly scientific conceptions of style in seventeenth-century British writing. I argue that the stylistic reforms of the period are best understood as shifts from mystical to skeptical attitudes toward the nature of forma , with technical issues of syntax playing a minor role. Philosophers from Bacon to Sprat argue against the assumptions of a magical worldview, that strange cosmos occupied by Faustus and Macbeth, not against a specific type of sentence structure or kind of metaphor. For the new scientists, ¿plainness¿ denotes a lack of occult influence in discourse, and it functions as a short-hand way of saying that one's philosophy of language is properly skeptical towards those more enchanted views of discourse found among scholastic mystics and Neoplatonic philosophers. Plainness is a philosophical category, not a grammatical one. Once we recover this forgotten meaning of plainness, we see more clearly that the advocates of the plain style do not share an antipathy towards ornamental styles, as is often suggested; rather, they share an antipathy towards occult conceptions of style. Anti-magical attitudes pervade the newly scientific consciousness, and without appreciating this point, the deep disputes about style in the seventeenth century are impossible to recognize for they are, that is, disputes about language and mysticism.