Experiential and Experimental Knowledge on the Early Modern English Stage

Attends to the early modern stage as a platform for the creation and interrogation of knowledge and knowledge production, experiential and experimental Contributes to our understanding of the ways the early modern world understood knowledge and knowledge production Intervenes in major currents in early modern literary and cultural studies Informed by science studies and exciting new research on early modern natural philosophy Addresses issues that would interest readers concerned with embodiment and environment, perception and the senses, passion and affect and emotion, bodily experience Interdisciplinary character of the project would interest readers from a wide range of fields including English literature, science studies, theatre history, philosophy, early modern history, religious studies, and comparative literature Early modern dramatists entertained audiences by staging experiential and experimental knowledge, especially consequential forms of coming to or arriving at knowledge. The contributors to this collection explore the ways in which the culture’s fascination with forms of knowledge creation – scientific, experiential, religious – shaped early modern drama. Experiential and Experimental Knowledge on the Early Modern English Stage addresses these issues from phenomenological, political and ethical perspectives and in terms of histories of science, cognitive and affective studies, and discourses of the body. Across the volume, the contributors articulate how the early modern stage served as a site where knowledge was not merely performed but produced and interrogated, imagined and transformed.