Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

According to a commonplace view, facts are evidence in potentia: mustered in an argument, deduced from a theory, or simply arranged in a pattern, they shed their proverbial obstinacy and help with the work of proof and disproof. However, in modern usage facts and evidence are nonetheless distinct categories, and crucially so. On their own, facts are notoriously inert-angular, stubborn, or even nasty in their resistance to interpretation and inference. They are robust in their existence and opaque in their meaning. Only when enlisted in the service of a claim or a conjecture do they become evidence, or facts with significance. Evidence might be described as facts hammered into signposts, which point beyond themselves and their sheer, brute thingness to states of affairs to which we have no direct access: the clues pertaining to a crime committed without witnesses, the observations testing a theory about the true configuration of the solar system or the workings of the mind, the ruins of a civilization that vanished millennia ago, the indices that predict the future. On this view, facts owe no permanent allegiance to any of the schemes into which they are impressed as evidence. They are the mercenary soldiers of argument, ready to enlist in yours or mine, wherever the evidentiary fit is best. It is exactly this fickle independence that makes