Book Review
A Culture of Fact: England, 1550-1720
Barbara Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550-1720 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 280 pp.
"Matters of fact," "evidences of the fact," "truth of the facts," "discourses of the fact," "notorious matters of fact," and the more emphatic "undoubted certainty of the matters of fact" emerged in the lexicon of an early modern England with an ever-increasing and "popular taste for facts." In Shapiro's formulation, then, [End Page 205] it was not a genteel class of virtuosi (not Royal Society scientists), but rather a culture of common-law juries and witnesses, that produced the framework for the rise of fact. Thus, as Shapiro observes, "a somewhat lower threshold than gentleman was epistemologically significant in the production of believable facts." The cultural obsession with fact produced a concomitant anatomization of disciplines and genres: there would now be "true reports" and "blatant frauds," "histories" and "fables," "news" and "Rumour," as well as versions of the "naked Truth" and mere "Rhetorical flourishes." So much had fact triumphed, and so much had the disciplinary hierarchies shifted, that even the latitudinarian orthodoxy of the 1690's had to justify itself not through the authority of Revelation alone, but also through recourse to the "very Facts of Scripture."
William Kolbrener
William Kolbrener is the author of Milton's Warring Angels: A Study of Critical Engagements. He is a senior lecturer in English literature at Bar-Ilan University.
