To provide knowledge of political and social types, character-writers needed to negotiate what details were salient in communicating the essence of someone or something. The paper makes the claim that there is a clear shift in character-writing across the century: a move from grounding knowledge rhetorically, by displaying what a person or thing is like, to grounding it empirically, by showing how they characteristically speak and act. I argue that, by the end of the seventeenth century, the character sketch had come to refer to something approaching two different kinds of genre––one more literary and one more scientific––divided by the question of how to capture someone or something’s nature.
This transformation corresponds to Michel Foucault’s classic account of how the seventeenth century moved away from a conception of knowledge grounded in chains of comparison, similarities, and resemblances. The story the character-books tell, however, goes beyond Foucault, in showing how this epistemic shift can be understood in terms of the politics of the English Revolution. In the writing of characters, a move into a more empirical paradigm was often used by the radical, republican, revolutionary side in the Civil War—while royalists instead largely continued to depict types through figurative language, resemblance, and rhetoric.