Katie Ebner-Landy, in “The Character Sketch as Political Knowledge,” focuses on the character sketches published throughout the English Civil War. She argues that this popular form became a means to provide knowledge of new political and social types, in a moment of disharmony and mistrust. To write a character-sketch, Ebner-Landy underlines, requires knowing what details are salient in communicating the essence of someone or something. By looking closely at the sketches written during and after the Civil War, she claims that the sketches themselves evidence the seventeenth-century’s epistemological shift: moving from grounding knowledge of people, places or things rhetorically (by displaying what a person or thing is like), to grounding it empirically (by showing how they characteristically speak and act). Though this transformation corresponds to Michel Foucault’s classic account, Ebner-Landy argues that Foucault neglected how this epistemic shift can be understood in terms of the politics of the English Revolution.

Spencer Weinreich, in his paper “The Genre of Solitary Confinement,” recovers what he calls “prisoner’s companions”: the prayerbooks and devotional manuals composed for prisoners to use. These texts range from brief tracts to multi-volume compendia, gathering prayers, hymns, scriptural readings, meditations, dialogues, and questionnaires meant to spiritualize the experience of confinement. In Weinreich’s argument, which draws a comparison with early modern traditions of devotional writing and practice, these companions should be understood as an attempt to manage the ineffability and indescribability of solitary confinement. Weinreich concludes by reflecting on the epistemological stakes of solitary confinement as a phenomenon in its own right, one potentially impervious to the historian’s methods, yet necessary to confront.

Emma Bartel, in her paper “The Epistemological Quest of a New ‘Way of Thinking’,” focuses our attention on the occasional meditation. She argues that the development of this ‘new’ literary genre of the occasional meditation in the seventeenth century – used in relation to both religious and mundane subjects – reflects a wider epistemological shift. New empirical methods (both scientific and religious), she argues, acquired a form of spiritual or moral knowledge accessible to all believers by way of direct observation and experience of the material world. By the mid-seventeenth century, she concludes, 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.