Joanna Picciotto Labors of Innocence in Early Modern EnglandLabors of Innocence in Early Modern England. Joanna Picciotto. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Pp. viii+863.

Abstract

The most important of all the ideas that link these various experimentalist worlds together is “a shared Adamic epistemology.” What this means is that the century as a whole shifted the emphasis from Eve’s act of punishable curiosity to Adam’s naming of the creatures (Gen. 2:19) as the primal scene of discovery. Bacon and the rest of his army thus redeemed curiosity from its association with original sin. Instead, it was linked with investigative labor. As Picciotto well puts it, “The first sin became the first virtue” (3). This radical rewriting of the Genesis story took some doing, and the book leaves nothing out in its own act of productive labor to recount how it happened. As we read on, engaging in what the author apparently thinks of, shamelessly, as our own necessary labor, we hear about the image of the intellectual as a public worker as well as, in a more directly Adamic sense, an ideal laborer, the precursor of the delvers and diggers. The ideal of this special work can be carried out in the laboratory or in the field, beyond class barriers and creating the idea of an English public “as a result of England’s revolutionary moment” (24). Another conventional distinction is also transcended, that between active and contemplative pursuits. The scientist recovers the theologically innocent eye of Adam. Eden is no longer a hortus conclusus. It can be reentered.