Katherine Attie | Towson University (original) (raw)

Uploads

Books by Katherine Attie

Gathering Force: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1557-1623, ed. Kristen Poole and Lauren Shohet, 2019

A conservative revolutionary if ever there was one, Francis Bacon strategically designed and prom... more A conservative revolutionary if ever there was one, Francis Bacon strategically designed and promoted his new science within a normative rhetorical framework of old metaphors. Focusing on one of these master tropes, the book of nature, this chapter argues that Bacon styled his oeuvre as an improved translation of God's works, "a kind of second Scripture," in order to align his interest in natural philosophy with Protestant emphasis on biblical exegesis. More specifically , Bacon sought to appeal to King James I, to whom he dedicated The Advancement of Learning (1605), by establishing continuity and complementarity between his plan for a new "natural history" and the crown's ambitious plan for a new English Bible, conceived at the Hampton Court Conference the year before. Tracing the nuances of the book of nature trope across Bacon's philosophical writings, I show how he used the metaphor in an attempt to unite seemingly conflicted, contradictory ends. On the one hand, Bacon the progressive idealist desired to help more people "read" God's creation accurately for themselves; on the other hand, Bacon the pragmatic royalist needed to assure James that the precious secrets of God and king would remain hidden safely away from "vulgar" understandings. It is no coincidence that Bacon's conception of his natural philosophic project sounds like the conception of the King James Bible: a vast labor whose fruits would benefit all, but whose work of translation would remain the province of a wise elect. In what follows, I explain the reciprocity between the Baconian program of scientific reform and the Jacobean program of scriptural reform. By focusing on how Bacon relates the metaphorical book of nature to the literal book of Scripture, I illustrate how metaphor worked to negotiate the ideological and political tensions that made innovation difficult in seventeenth-century England.

Routledge Companion to Women, Sex, and Gender in the Early British Colonial World, ed. Kimberly Anne Coles and Eve Keller, 2019

Papers by Katherine Attie

If you give power to those who are bad, and hand the city over to them, you destroy those who are... more If you give power to those who are bad, and hand the city over to them, you destroy those who are better. In exactly the same way, we shall say, the imitative poet sets up a bad regime in the soul of each individual, gratifying the senseless part of it, the part which cannot distinguish larger from smaller, and which regards the same things at one time as large and at another time as small. He is nothing but an image-maker, and he stands far removed from the truth.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

For English landowners in the seventeenth century, the enclosure of common-use pastures, farms, a... more For English landowners in the seventeenth century, the enclosure of common-use pastures, farms, and fields made good economic sense, as land was simply worth more enclosed than unenclosed. Once a property was hedged or fenced, it commanded higher rent, facilitated the selective breeding of livestock, enabled the quality of the land to be improved by such techniques as floating meadows and draining fens, and yielded increased profits from more intensive, flexible, and efficient arable farming. 1 Enclosure and the agricultural improvements that enclosure made possible were not universally welcomed however: in the eyes of the rest of the agrarian population, enclosing landlords were seen as acting in no one's interest but their own. The main victims of enclosure were the poor subsistence farmers whose survival was tied to the scattered strips of land they cultivated on the commons. As a result of enclosure, which eliminated common property rights and access to waste ground, entire villages were depopulated. Railing against enclosing landlords in a sermon delivered at Lutterworth and published in 1653, Leicestershire minister John Moore complained that they "care not how many Beggers they make, so themselves may be Gentlemen; nor how many poor they make, so themselves may be rich. I mean the unsociable, covetous, cruel broode of those wretches, that by their Inclosure do unpeople Towns, and uncorn fields." 2 Thus attacked from the pulpit, private enclosure had to be defended on both social and spiritual grounds: the promoters of improvement sought to establish that the movement served the common good and the nation as a whole, and they tried to show that the private landowner, by improving his soil, was also improving his soul. Drawing from selected Katherine Bootle Attie is a lecturer in literature at

Conference Presentations by Katherine Attie

Gathering Force: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1557-1623, ed. Kristen Poole and Lauren Shohet, 2019

A conservative revolutionary if ever there was one, Francis Bacon strategically designed and prom... more A conservative revolutionary if ever there was one, Francis Bacon strategically designed and promoted his new science within a normative rhetorical framework of old metaphors. Focusing on one of these master tropes, the book of nature, this chapter argues that Bacon styled his oeuvre as an improved translation of God's works, "a kind of second Scripture," in order to align his interest in natural philosophy with Protestant emphasis on biblical exegesis. More specifically , Bacon sought to appeal to King James I, to whom he dedicated The Advancement of Learning (1605), by establishing continuity and complementarity between his plan for a new "natural history" and the crown's ambitious plan for a new English Bible, conceived at the Hampton Court Conference the year before. Tracing the nuances of the book of nature trope across Bacon's philosophical writings, I show how he used the metaphor in an attempt to unite seemingly conflicted, contradictory ends. On the one hand, Bacon the progressive idealist desired to help more people "read" God's creation accurately for themselves; on the other hand, Bacon the pragmatic royalist needed to assure James that the precious secrets of God and king would remain hidden safely away from "vulgar" understandings. It is no coincidence that Bacon's conception of his natural philosophic project sounds like the conception of the King James Bible: a vast labor whose fruits would benefit all, but whose work of translation would remain the province of a wise elect. In what follows, I explain the reciprocity between the Baconian program of scientific reform and the Jacobean program of scriptural reform. By focusing on how Bacon relates the metaphorical book of nature to the literal book of Scripture, I illustrate how metaphor worked to negotiate the ideological and political tensions that made innovation difficult in seventeenth-century England.

Routledge Companion to Women, Sex, and Gender in the Early British Colonial World, ed. Kimberly Anne Coles and Eve Keller, 2019

If you give power to those who are bad, and hand the city over to them, you destroy those who are... more If you give power to those who are bad, and hand the city over to them, you destroy those who are better. In exactly the same way, we shall say, the imitative poet sets up a bad regime in the soul of each individual, gratifying the senseless part of it, the part which cannot distinguish larger from smaller, and which regards the same things at one time as large and at another time as small. He is nothing but an image-maker, and he stands far removed from the truth.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

For English landowners in the seventeenth century, the enclosure of common-use pastures, farms, a... more For English landowners in the seventeenth century, the enclosure of common-use pastures, farms, and fields made good economic sense, as land was simply worth more enclosed than unenclosed. Once a property was hedged or fenced, it commanded higher rent, facilitated the selective breeding of livestock, enabled the quality of the land to be improved by such techniques as floating meadows and draining fens, and yielded increased profits from more intensive, flexible, and efficient arable farming. 1 Enclosure and the agricultural improvements that enclosure made possible were not universally welcomed however: in the eyes of the rest of the agrarian population, enclosing landlords were seen as acting in no one's interest but their own. The main victims of enclosure were the poor subsistence farmers whose survival was tied to the scattered strips of land they cultivated on the commons. As a result of enclosure, which eliminated common property rights and access to waste ground, entire villages were depopulated. Railing against enclosing landlords in a sermon delivered at Lutterworth and published in 1653, Leicestershire minister John Moore complained that they "care not how many Beggers they make, so themselves may be Gentlemen; nor how many poor they make, so themselves may be rich. I mean the unsociable, covetous, cruel broode of those wretches, that by their Inclosure do unpeople Towns, and uncorn fields." 2 Thus attacked from the pulpit, private enclosure had to be defended on both social and spiritual grounds: the promoters of improvement sought to establish that the movement served the common good and the nation as a whole, and they tried to show that the private landowner, by improving his soil, was also improving his soul. Drawing from selected Katherine Bootle Attie is a lecturer in literature at