The Cognitive Politics of Writing in Jacobean England: Bacon, Coke, and the Case of Edmund Peacham

This essay demonstrates how disputes over the cognitive processes that structure both manuscript and print helped establish and limit Jacobean state authority. It investigates the 1614 clash between James I, Francis Bacon, and Edward Coke that occurred in the aftermath of the arrest of Edmund Peacham, a Somerset minister, and the discovery of his undelivered sermon that attacked James. The ensuing debate over the nature of Peacham’s offense and the textual evidence that revealed it is then juxtaposed with disputes over Coke’s Reports. When read together, these debates demonstrate how early modern disputes over the processes of writing illumine a much larger struggle over how mechanisms of individual and corporate thought can constitute a nascent claim to a liberty of the mind.