The Classical Silva and the Generic Development of Scientific Writing in Seventeenth-Century England

In this paper I propose to explore some aspects of the development of scientific and technical writing in seventeenth- and eighteenth- century England, in particular its relation to preexisting literary genres. These generic affiliations comprise numerous strands, including the aphorism, the essay, the georgic, the letter, and the silva. ¹ The latter form, largely unknown and unpracticed today, will be the primary focus in the discussion that follows. The silva is a "collection" genre, a miscellaneous poetic form of classical origin which enjoyed a great vogue in the Renaissance and early eighteenth century. The best-known practitioner of the form in ancient times was the Roman poet Statius, who produced a collection of thirty-two occasional poems entitled Silvae. The Latin word silva literally means "wood" or "forest," but its use as a literary term plays on several metaphorical meanings the word acquired over time, especially "pieces of raw material" and "material for construction." The sanction the silva provides for literary forms of mixed character and content was to prove of the greatest importance to those who composed scientific treatises or edited and contributed to early scientific journals.

One might well ask at the outset why a critical investigation of emergent scientific writing and its genres should focus on a minor classical form practised by a lesser-known poet of Rome's silver age. The simplest answer is that some great innovators in the history of science consciously invoked the silva as a model for their texts and referred to it in their critical reflections on the nature of scientific writing. ² A prominent instance of this is Francis Bacon, whose Sylva Sylvarum: or a Natural History (1627) parades its literary pedigree on its title page. Equally noteworthy is John Evelyn, a founding member of the Royal Society, who published Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest Trees in 1664. As late as 1765, the poet and gentleman agriculturist Walter Harte recommended the title Sylvae to the youthful Arthur Young for a collection of miscellaneous essays on agriculture he had previously published in the periodical Museum Rusticum. At the same time, the silva enjoyed a revival in the more conventionally literary context of seventeenth-century poetry, furnishing a model for collections of poems by such writers as Ben Jonson, John Milton, Abraham Cowley, and John Dryden.

Simply to cite these examples, however, does not answer fully the question why early writers of science turned to the silva as they cast about for appropriate literary forms to shape a new discourse and a novel kind of writing. A cursory examination of Bacon's Sylva Sylvarum reveals that this pioneering text differs in important respects from what a contemporary reader with the example of Statius in mind might conventionally have expected in a silva. Bacon clearly had other generic possibilities besides the silva in view, most notably the aphorism and the essay, and his text also reflects a strong cultural pressure to employ more rhetorically extended and complete forms. A simple or straightforward model of generic influence, by which a later writer is seen to map the salient features of a preexisting form onto a new body of material, will not do to explain the literary innovation Bacon is striving to achieve. His use of the silva calls for a more supple and ramified theory of generic change. Such a theory must explain discontinuities as well as continuities among texts that are ostensibly members of the same generic class, and account for the often unexpected ways in which writers combine features of existing forms, while simultaneously adding new literary traits of their own invention.

The kind of sophistication in generic understanding called for here, an awareness capable of registering conflict and difference in the intellectual, cultural, and social implications of generic choices, was in fact readily available to writers and critics in the early modern period. They regarded generic...