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The last 15 years have brought a revolution to research in 17th- and 18th-century English Catholicism. New approaches, shaped primarily by New Historicism and gender studies, have expanded the materials, questions, and methods driving scholarly investigations. The article describes several primary trends within this revolution: the development of inward-oriented and outward-oriented studies examining English Catholicism and English Catholicism's relationship with other discourses, respectively; a growing interest in women's experiences of and contributions to English Catholicism, particularly those of English nuns in exile; and a new narrative for 18th-century English Catholicism revealing its public as well as private iterations and impacts. Overall, current scholarship draws on a plethora of materials including material objects, texts, and space to construct an increasingly detailed picture of English Catholicism as a complex, dynamic force, and community during the 17th and 18th centuries.

This chapter analyzes Gulliver’s Travels (2010) to demonstrate how twenty-first century adaptors and writers recognize the artificial nature of “history” and ideology’s role in creating it. Starring Jack Black, this adaptation of Jonathan Swift’s novel displays history as a malleable narrative whose impact on the present is direct and profound, and consequently both potentially liberating or potentially destructive. The discussion focuses on several aspects of the film: its use of various forms of history to establish the idea that it is an infinitely renewable narrative; its recognition of the original novel, and cultural texts more broadly, as a culturally valuable historical artefact; and its use of space to create history, including its own narrative of the role of history and text.

The final chapter shows how films and television programs like Crusoe (2008, 2009) and Crossbones (2014) represent the long eighteenth century to establish a “creation myth” that justifies real or projected aspects of early millennium ideology. These programs locate the origins of technophilia and social liberalism in the eighteenth century, and depict them as close bedfellows whose relationship began in the long eighteenth century. Both programs celebrate technology and both programs endorse a seemingly egalitarian approach to race, class, and gender that they associate with technology. Further examination in the chapter reveals, however, that the social and economic values are ultimately as conservative if not more so than they are liberal, and that technology’s origins are described to support extant economic and social structures and systems.

Riffing on P.L. Hartley’s line that “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” this chapter examines how the spatialization of literature and history in film and television allows and encourages audiences to use “the Regency” as a site for the gratification of desire. The historical reality show Regency House Party (2004) and the film adaptation of Austenland (2013) present the Regency as a place that one can visit, a place where desire, specifically female desire, is validated and fulfilled. As this chapter reveals, that female desire is constructed and bounded by heteronormativity and objectification. Seemingly affirming independent female desire, the spatialized Regency in these productions affirms conservative norms, presenting objectification and passivity as the apex of women’s pleasure.

If there is anyone who epitomizes the ability to remain detached from an experiment and its results, one could make a strong case for Isaac Newton, who once pushed a needle into the socket behind his own eyeball in order to further his inquiries into the nature of optics. Reporting the procedure in his notebook, he writes, I took a bodkin (g h) & put it betwixt my eye and ye bone as near to the Backside of my eye as I could: & pressing my eye with ye end of it (soe as to make the curvature a, b c d e f in my eye) there appeared severall white dark & coloured circles r, s, t, etc. Which circles were plainest when I continued to rub my eye with ye point of ye bodkin, but if I held my eye & ye bodkin still, though I continued to presse my eye with it yet ye circles would grow faint & often disappear until I renewed em by moving my eye or ye bodkin.1 Consider what it takes to devise such an experiment, then to sharpen the needle, insert it into one’s head, press it repeatedly against the back of one’s eyeball, and take lucid, thorough notes on the experience. Contrast this detachment with Newton’s infamous pugnacity or compare his fierce professional and personal isolation at Cambridge with his behavior starting in 1689, when he became socially and politically active, eventually moving to London to become Warden of the Mint in 1696.2

Introduction 1. Notions of the Self 2. An Ingenious Romance:The Stable Self 3. The Fly's Eye: The Composite Self 4.The Detached Observer 5. The Moral Observer Conclusion

Introducing the second edition of Isaac Newton’s Principia in 1713, Roger Cotes announced that “Those who assume hypotheses as first principles of their speculations, although they afterwards proceed with the greatest accuracy from those principles, may indeed form an ingenious romance, but a romance it will still be.”1 Although it would have outraged him to hear such a claim, the argument could be made that the new natural philosophy in England, including the work in Newton’s Principia that he was so unequivocally defending, was founded upon a hypothesis: the idea that humans possess a unified, stable self. Newton may have been correct about gravity, as Robert Hooke was correct about the appearance of a flea and Robert Boyle correct about a vacuum; they proceeded, in other words, with the greatest accuracy. But the first principle of their speculations, that human beings possess a stable self capable of rational and detached observation and cogitation leading to knowledge of the natural world, appeared to some thinkers and writers to be more hypothesis than fact. Furthermore, those thinkers and writers were often uncomfortable with the impact that this idea of self had on the definition of knowledge and the attendant distribution of power in their world.

As Anthony Wood laments in An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears’s novel about the philosophical revolution in seventeenth-century Oxford, “[T]he infallible philosophical method seems inadequate when it comes to problems in which motion derives from people rather than dead matter.”1 Even in the twenty-first century, we are more accurate predicting the orbits of comets than predicting the motions of human individuals. Why the difficulty? If people are people just as apples are apples, why should the “infallible philosophical method seem inadequate” for explaining “motion deriving from people rather than dead matter”? And what about that word “seems”—is it ever possible to overcome that inadequacy and if so, how?

The Scientific or Philosophical Revolution depended significantly on a new notion of the self. Crises of “knowability,” that is, challenges to established definitions of knowledge and established methods for identifying and transmitting it during the early modern period were driven in part by new ideas of what human beings can achieve.1 Philosophers developed new schools of thought predicated on the idea that the limits of human knowledge were the fault of human error: errors of the body, of the mind, and of the methods for gathering knowledge. Capable of acquiring an accurate understanding of the workings of nature, the self simply needed the right combination of training, tools, and technique. In this view, humans are not limited to certain truths by our place in the cosmos. Certainly philosophers of the revolution such as Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, and Isaac Newton recognized that the search for knowledge was hindered by a flawed body and a flawed mind. The body’s perceptions, the workings of its sense organs, were limited and unreliable—humans can only see so far or so small and their eyes can be tricked, for example. The mind’s workings could also be derailed, such as by unfortunate habits of mind or by desire. “Thoughts, for Bacon, are shaped by ways of living,” John E. Leary observes.2

Mary Davys is the author in this study who is the exception that proves the rule. While Aphra Behn, Jane Barker, and Eliza Haywood all had connections to natural philosophy one way or another, Mary Davys did not. She knew Cambridge students, but there is no evidence that her acquaintances were or went on to be natural philosophers. Nor is there evidence that Davys read works of natural philosophy, although her novels suggest that she was familiar with natural philosophy from its presence in popular culture. It is precisely because of the nature of this connection to natural philosophy that Mary Davys’s novels concern the final chapter of this book. Davys’s work reveals an ongoing interest in the relationship between knowledge and morality, detachment and integration that occupied so much of natural philosophy during this period. Like Eliza Haywood’s The Tea-Table (1725) discussed in the previous chapter, Davys’s novels investigate how a self can be not only reliably truthful because disengaged but also reliably judgmental because morally correct. Unlike Haywood’s narrative, which explores the issue in terms of the social position of the narrator, Davys’s narratives consistently consider the issue in terms of the nature of the self. In attempting to create a self who is internally morally invested but narratively detached, Davys draws on contemporary, if debated, ideas of the self and develops techniques that underpin literary omniscience.

An astounding number of watershed events occurred in the period between 1660 and 1700 in England, the establishment of a national institution for pursuing science not least among them. The intellectual tumult in Europe during the seventeenth century produced, in 1662, the chartering of The Royal Society, which was dedicated to the search for knowledge to be used for the benefit of humanity through a particular movement in natural philosophy called the “New Science,” also known as experimental philosophy. As part of the Royal Society’s efforts to secure greater respect and a larger following for its methods and conclusions, its fellows engaged in a public campaign to make those methods and conclusions mainstream. Such efforts, including Robert Hooke’s spectacular Micrographia (1665) and Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667), had mixed results in terms of public approval, but they were successful in terms of bringing the ideas and methods of experimental philosophy into the cultural mainstream. Other innovators, including dramatists and prose writers, picked up these ideas and used them for the literary developments of the time. One such author was Aphra Behn (c.1640–89). Her narratives reveal a profound interest in the concerns and methods of natural philosophy and demonstrate how the ideas, methods, and rhetorical challenges of the philosophical debates directly influenced the emerging novel’s interests and form.