Experiential and Experimental Knowledge on the Early Modern English Stage - (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture) (Hardcover)

About the Book

Attends to the early modern stage as a platform for the creation and interrogation of knowledge and knowledge production, experiential and experimental.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

This collection of essays provides us with a series of fresh and illuminating entry points into the relationship between experience and experiment in the early modern world, and proves beyond any reasonable doubt that the theatre is one of the most illuminating entry points of all. Highly recommended.--Rhodri Lewis, Princeton University