Early Modern Architectural Imaginations, 1590-1630

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From the heavenly New Jerusalem to the Metaverse, people have attempted to order the ideals, ideas and memories which clutter the mind in architectural space. My DPhil examines the propositional value of architecture in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, exploring the extent to which buildings were granted the capacity to express ideas in a way analogous to language, as well as the architectural qualities of literary texts. Early modern preachers such as Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne are particularly helpful for this, given the complex relationship between a sermon and its architectural setting. For the early modern preacher, the careful and to some extent formulaic structuring of a text mirrors the careful, formulaic construction of a church.Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy is also organised architecturally, with diagrammatic maps at each partition, endless subdivisions, and forewarnings that sections are dangerous to enter. Eleanor Vicari and Mary Ann Lund both argue for Burton's pastoral, preacherly qualities in ways which naturally bring him into conversation with Andrewes and Donne. I would, however, dispute Vicari's dismissal of architecture in Burton as mostly "incidental to some other topic", given how much of what is important in Burton can appear incidental.This question is equally important for Francis Bacon, who often used architectural metaphors for his project of expanding the bounds of knowledge. Nicholas West argues that Bacon's father designed the family home as a spatial text, while Paula Henderson and Michael Bath describe Bacon's practical interest in architecture. I will develop this work by arguing that his family home shaped Bacon's images for the domestication of knowledge.This circular interchange between physical space and the imaginative representation of knowledge, both religious and scientific, would be a central concern of my research, leading to my second question: how did the authors' enmeshment in domestic, institutional and religious life influence their work? My research builds on the work on early modern private lives pursued recently by Lena Orlin in Locating Privacy in Tudor London, bringing this focus on quotidian spatiality to bear on some of the most prominent intellectual figures of the time. Andrewes and Burton spent most of their lives in collegiate, institutional settings, while Bacon and (when he became a bishop) Andrewes were the heads of important households. I will examine how each writer shaped and navigated their domestic, institutional and religious spaces, and how this affected their writing.Third, I will address how these figures can be placed in wider theoretical frameworks about privacy, secularisation and the spaces of knowledge and power, without losing sight of their literary and historical particularity. Expanding on Robert Evans' theoretical-historical approach, I will question how Burton, Bacon, Donne and Andrewes conform to and disrupt the (very different) narratives about the spatiality of knowledge, power and moral selfhood told by Michel Foucault and Charles Taylor. By giving sustained attention to how buildings shape the self, my research contributes to present-day conversations about identity in the context of open-plan designs which attempt to do away with the partitions introduced in early modernity but in some ways reinforce them.I will use the Burton archives at the Bodleian, the Bacon archives at Trinity College Cambridge and Andrewes' private library in Pembroke College Cambridge, as well as material in British Library. As far as possible, I will also visit architecturally significant sites for each author, especially Andrewes' and Burton's churches and colleges, and the remains of Bacon's home at Gorhambury. This combination of archival and theoretical research is appropriate to a project which seeks to better understand how theoretical ideas are shaped by and expressed in material reality.