Rhetoric, Science, and Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (review)

Mr. Stark’s primary thesis postulates that learning and science “used the idea of plainness in order to distinguish between their non-magical understandings of language and esoteric beliefs held by wizards, witches, theurgists, and other practitioners of mysterious arts. . . . ‘Plainness’ was a philosophical idea, not a syntactical one.” The goal of Bacon, Casaubon, Dryden, and their ilk was “the most significant linguistic happening in seventeenth-century England.” More controversial, Mr. Stark’s second thesis concerns “Enlightenment rhetorical castoffs” that “fell by the wayside.” Against “modernity’s materialization of language . . . trapping the human voice in the bric-a-bric of the material world,” he argues for “the return of enchanted rhetoric.” It is a spiritually weighted agenda that connects language “to the Word at the beginning of the world” and refuses the separation of “Spirit . . . from daily life and language.” Conversely, “nefarious eloquence” is an evil that “infects individuals—and congregations of individuals.” “Nonchalant about the world of the preternatural and the supernatural,” scholars lack the sophistication and sensitivity of their early modern counterparts. These two theses are conflated in his methodology, which is a type of worldview analysis: “we are challenged to perceive in every aspect of style a broader Weltanschauung. . . . By setting aside typical concerns over tropes and syntactical configurations, we can apprehend the real target of the plain language advocates, and this is the enchanted Renaissance cosmos in all of its rhetorical mystery and charm.”

The first thesis has much merit. Proceeding through an analysis of Bacon, Daniel Sennert, and Joseph Glanvill, Mr. Stark demonstrates that these “new philosophers” opposed “charmed tropes” in order to advance “a non-magical philosophy of rhetoric commensurable with the ethos of modern experimentalism.” This trajectory, in Mr. Stark’s argument, culminates in the plain language reforms of the Royal Society—a politically motivated opposition to “bewitching idioms, which most intellectuals of the period saw as the primary linguistic cause of England’s religious and social strife.” In his narrative of transformation from “numinous sensibilities” to a “proto-Enlightenment style,” Sprat and Locke are central. However, this conflation of the political, linguistic, and religious, by way of weltanschauung analysis and a chronological division circa 1665 is also reductive. Any judgment of the “aura” of a person’s writings that can lead to an easy correlation between Donne and Cromwell is highly problematic; more nuanced distinctions need to be made when assessing the interrelationships between politics, religion, and style, especially in the first sixty years of the seventeenth century.

The argument is stronger in his chapter on natural magic, where Mr. Stark differentiates between Rosicrucians and experimentalists based on their philosophy of rhetoric: “Rhetoric is a cosmological architectonic in occult philosophy. For new scientists and writers influenced by them, however, tropes had only figurative significance, not ontological.” This is a theological and philosophical claim, not a political one. By demonstrating the shift from ontological significance to figurative correspondence in the theories of language that separated members of the Royal Society from magicians (though even this differentiation is slippery), Mr. Stark rightly “calls into serious question the recurrent thesis that Renaissance magic somehow evolved into the new experimentalism.” A philosophy of style that treats language as a neutral “tool” is incommensurable with a philosophy that sees it as “an occult device capable of transmogrifying reality.”

However, his composite chapter on demonic eloquence again overplays the usefulness of weltanschauung analysis by arguing that in order to perceive the significance of demonic rhetoric, “spiritual sensitivity” is essential in “addition to a tropological sensitivity” if the “aura” of a discourse is to be discerned accurately. Here Mr. Stark’s important recognition of the link between a particular author’s style and philosophy becomes a kind of ontological determinism that irons out important shades of nuance, conflict, and the juxtaposition of voices within early modern texts. In his argument against the reduction of philosophies of rhetoric to syntactical styles, Mr. Stark is in danger of reducing style or tropes to signifiers...