Abstract
‘Allegory, both intuitively and historically, seems to be that discourse that would be most threatening to science,’ writes James J. Paxson.1 Allegory is about hidden meanings and knowledge; it is the discourse of polysemy. Science is about bringing knowledge into the light; it is the discourse of perspicuity. Allegory and science are thus inherently inimical. Such, at least, is our modern assumption. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century natural philosophy, however, allegory and scientific pursuits were not antithetical. Indeed, the intellectual architecture of allegory—which, after all, had been the dominant interpretive mode for well over a millennium—offered a familiar structure for new ideas. As Paxson himself so brilliantly demonstrates, for instance, the idea of allegory shaped the sixteenth-century advent of the logarithm.2
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Poole, K. (2017). God’s Game of Hide-and-Seek: Bacon and Allegory. In: Marchitello, H., Tribble, E. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science . Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46361-6_6
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