Language Reform in the Late Seventeenth Century

chapter 3 Language Reform in the Late Seventeenth Century

Ryan J. Stark

In the opening chapter [Rhetoric, Science, and Magic in Seventeenth-Century England], I focused upon the rise of the new plain style, emphasizing how modern experimentalists rejected both the tropes of magic and mystery and, in the opposite direction, the discourses of materialism and skepticism (e.g., sadducism, deism, and atheism). In this chapter, I concentrate on the culmina- tion of rhetorical reform in early modern England: the Royal Society’s plain language program. I show in particular how members of the organization and other like-minded writers used the new plain style in order to counteract bewitching idioms, which most intellectuals of the period saw as the primary linguistic cause of England’s religious and social strife. My overarching argument is that a group of experimental philosophers—by creating a new under- standing of style, and of language in general—brought about a paradigm shift in the English rhetorical tradition. Of course, significant changes in the world require many different participants in many different capacities, and the seventeenth-century reformation in style is no exception. A small circle of scientific writers did not alter the linguistic cosmos by themselves. To appreciate how plainness emerged on a large scale requires at minimum a non-linear model of how ideas influence societies, not to mention an intuition about the workings of Zeitgeists. James Sutherland is a bit hyperbolic when he suggests that after 1660 English prose gets a fresh start.1 He would have been more accurate to say that English philosophy of rhetoric begins anew around 1665, give or take several years, building upon Francis Bacon’s key formulation of the split between words and things in The Advancement of Learning, and also drawing upon many other criticisms of enchanted rhetoric in the late Renaissance, including those offered by philosophers, orators, poets, and, most notably, preachers and theologians. That phrasing, however, is cumbersome. English rhetoric begins anew on a massive scale in the Restoration, when the occult Renaissance cosmos starts to collapse in mainstream intellectual circles. On the question of who deserves the most credit for conceptualizing this rhetorical reformation (though not the only credit), it is difficult, if not impossible, to identify any other group besides those working in the tradition of modern experimentalism, before and after the establishment of the Royal Society. By advancing plainness so

1 Sutherland, On English Prose, 67.

Language Reform In The Late Seventeenth Century 95 effectively, experimental philosophers transformed the English rhetorical universe, laying groundwork for the rise of the Enlightenment linguistic sensibility broadly imagined.

Thomas Sprat’s and John Locke’s Arguments against Bewitching Rhetoric

Many writers advanced the cause of rhetorical plainness in the late seventeenth century, but the most famous argument arrives in The History of the Royal Society (1667), where Sprat claims that the Royal Society shapes a new “plain” style for a new epoch.2 Sprat, to be sure, advertises the plain language program as much as he reports upon its widespread influence. And, more generally, he writes some- thing other than disinterested history in his History, which should not be a sur- prise. His book is better seen as hopeful history, but with real momentum. In 1667, it is too early to say definitively that Sprat was correct about what he described. After all, the Royal Society was in its infancy, and the idea of stylistic plainness still met with considerable resistance from numerous magical and mystical philosophers, including occult writers such as Elias Ashmole and Thomas Vaughan, both of whom worked against plainness as members of the Royal Society.3 Importantly, however, Sprat was in the process of becoming right as the idea of the new plain style slowly pervaded almost every aspect of Restoration scientific and rhetorical culture, after many decades of conflict between new philosophers and occultists of various sorts. While far from neutral in his vision of the world, Sprat captured the gist of a massive rhetorical shift, even a catastrophic shift, from the standpoint of occult mentalities. Sprat attacks “tropes and figures” in what has become a well-known passage from the History, where he simultaneously advocates the new plain style.4 After noting that rhetorical ornaments pose no threat in the “hands of Wise Men,” but pose a serious threat in the hands of “the Wicked,” Sprat comments upon contemporary rhetoric in England: “But now [tropes] are generally chang’d to worse uses: they make the fancy disgust the best things, if they come to sound, and unadorned: they are in open defiance against Reason […and]

2 Sprat, The History of the Royal Society (London, 1667), 112. 3 On Ashmole, see Tobias Churton, The Magus of Freemasonry. The Mysterious Life of Elias Ashmole. Scientist, Alchemist, and Founder of the Royal Society (Rochester, vt: Inner Traditions, 2006). 4 Sprat, The History of the Royal Society, 112.