Early English Monstrosity: Francis Bacon and His Interlocutors

This dissertation charts the distinct but related epistemological, ontological, and aesthetic frameworks defining approaches to monstrosity for three early modern English authors: Francis Bacon, Benjamin Jonson, and Thomas Browne. A central claim is that threads of Bacon’s approach to monstrosity, and natural philosophy broadly, are evident and influential in the approaches of Jonson and Browne, particularly in the way that Bacon extricates monstrosity from the supernatural, figurative, and divine, instead rooting it in the natural and explicable. The dissertation also locates each author’s conception of monstrosity in relation to art and nature. Because monstrosity is pervasive—engaged in aesthetics, morality, nature and natural order, social mores, and other aspects of culture and knowledge making—the point on the spectrum between art and nature at which each author positions monstrosity offers insight into broader early modern considerations of the relationships between art, nature, and monstrosity. Related to these considerations is each author’s concern for establishing criteria to determine kinds or types of things, including the boundaries for genres, species, normal and abnormal, truth and error, natural and artificial, natural and monstrous, and monstrous and artificial. The first chapter excavates Bacon’s terminologically labyrinthine definition of monstrosity, illustrating Bacon’s struggle to describe monstrosity as he simultaneously works to sever its ties with supernatural perceptions of it. It argues that monstrosity is central to Bacon’s goals of reforming natural philosophy, presenting it as a tool that creates clarity in the natural world and provides opportunities for human improvement. The second chapter demonstrates the natural historical texts influencing Jonson’s Epicoene to contextualize his satirical critiques of characters whose bodies cross boundaries between genders and species. It argues that Jonson strategically utilizes but also satirizes monstrosity to rebuke what he views as sociocultural dysfunction in the form of monstrous mixture. The third chapter examines Browne’s Religio Medici and Pseudodoxia Epidemica to establish Browne’s distinctive acceptance of monstrosity’s inherent resistance to categorization. It argues that despite Browne’s unwavering faith and piety, his conception of monstrosity is not rooted in divine punishment or warning; rather, monstrosity represents God’s unknowable wisdom, which is worthy of our wonder.Doctor of Philosoph