The Epistemological Quest of a New "Way of Thinking"

Targeting Robert Boyle’s Occasional Reflections (1665), Jonathan Swift’s satire A Meditation upon a Broomstick (1701) points to the surprisingly comical dimension of seventeenth-century subjects of occasional meditations. And yet, far from an attempt at comedy, Lancelot Reynold’s meditation on a urinal (1641) and Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick’s meditation on a pewter dish (1663-1677) are revealing examples of a new focus on unusual, trivial or mundane domestic objects (including cushions and mouse traps) and its spaces (ranging from bed canopies to garden hedges) in seventeenth-century meditative writing.

In this paper I would like to show how the development of this ‘new’ literary genre of the occasional meditation reflects a wider epistemological shift - that is, new empirical methods (both scientific and religious) of acquiring a form of spiritual or moral knowledge accessible to all believers by way of direct observation and experience of the material world. As Boyle explains in his theory of occasional meditation, the ‘Creatures’, if subject to the believer’s close attention, can become ‘Doctors of Divinity’ and ‘Teachers of Ethicks’.

Discourses surrounding the authenticity of the meditation’s subject-matter and the believer’s ability to meditate efficiently and access spiritual and moral truths complexify what we usually think of as a reflective genre akin to prayer. Instead, by the mid-seventeenth century, occasional meditation operates a reflexive genre through which the believer can question the epistemic value of their acquired knowledge and justify their quest for a ‘useful’ kind of knowledge which serves to better their conduct and is opposed to bookish or learned knowledge.