"To know, to fly, to conjure": situating Baconian science at the juncture of early modern modes of reading.
THIS IS AN ESSAY ABOUT READING. Though my central texts are visual ones, with what we might now regard as journalistic or anthropologic aims, the thrust of my argument extends beyond any one medium of communication, specific subject, or genre of inquiry. My framing concern here is to examine a historically specific structure, one that Tony Bennett has called a "reading formation": "a set of discursive and intertextual determinations that organize and animate the practice of reading, connecting texts and readers in specific relations to one another by constituting readers and reading subjects of particular types and texts as objects-to-be read in particular ways. This entails arguing that texts have, and can have, no existence independently of such reading formations . ... Texts exist only as always-already organized, or as activated to be read in certain ways, just as readers exist as always-already activated to read in certain ways."I Though Bennett's formulation derives from his examination of literary writing and revolves around the interchange between book-readers and books, his model is easily assimilable to other, less evidently textual, occasions when readers read. The reading formation that will be attended to here is situated within the practice of natural philosophy in late Tudor and early Stuart England. Our readers are natural philosophers engaged in empirical observation; the objects read, the flora, fauna, and humans that inhabit the natural world. One, admittedly important, dimension of Bennett's project-how "always-already organized" texts exist to be "read in certain ways" -will be neglected. My focus instead will be on the constitution of the reader, who, in Bennett's words, is "activated to read in a certain way" within a given reading formation. My specific object of study will be the scientific reader's way of reading, both the character of the perceptual act itself and the use to which the repertoire of previous experiences and textual notions