Sherman argues that Marvell contributes to the secularization of the ars moriendi by exploring problems of taste in scenes of death. Sherman situates Marvell’s interest in taste by glancing at French and Italian forays into literary aesthetics and by Marvell’s own disquisitions on offensive style in his prose polemics. It is no surprise then to find Marvell experimenting with problems of good and bad taste in poems describing death like 'An Horatian Ode', 'The Unfortunate Lover', 'The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn', and in the tableaus featuring the demise of Captain Douglas. Sherman suggests that Marvell taps into Catholic iconography associated with the arts of dying to overstep the bounds of aesthetic and rhetorical decorum. He appropriates the sensuality of the Counter-Reformation’s aesthetic exalting the martyred body and the literature of tears (ars lachrimandi). With his focus on moments of sudden death, Marvell casts doubt on the value of preparing for a good death, instead preferring to observe how beauty is cut down in its prime. In this way, Marvell’s poetry of memorialization aestheticizes mortality and the work of mourning.

Most literary histories of Renaissance skepticism neglect medieval skepticism and address a single genre, usually drama, or a single author, usually Montaigne or Shakespeare. This literary history of skepticism in England addresses medieval skepticism as well as multiple genres and authors. The introduction defines key terms, distinguishes between first- and second-wave skepticism (using William Walwyn and Joseph Glanvill as examples), and clarifies the relation of skepticism to secularization. It reviews competing narratives of secularization in early modernity, including those of Hans Blumenberg, C. John Sommerville, and Charles Taylor. It argues that the challenges posedby philosophical skepticism incite aesthetic innovation. Issues of cognition, language, ethics, and politics are identified. These include problems of doubt and suspended judgment, the uncertainty of private experience, illusions of impartiality, dilemmas of neutrality, parodies of sovereignty, questions of religious conflict, dissent and toleration, as well the pleasures of aisthesis and the skeptical sublime.

The afterword considers the crisis of experience in Milton’s Samson Agonistes. Samson’s uncertainties about God’s plans and his difficulties interpreting his own heart capture the plight of the godly individual in a world with a hidden God (a deus absconditus). His desire for freedom and his will to instigate political action in the absence of divine guidance capture the modern condition inaugurated by the nominalist sense of God’s distance and inscrutable power. Baffled by his own inner promptings and unable to tolerate this opacity, Samson feels compelled to experiment and hazard his strength against his enemies. Samson’s skeptical doubt results in revenge and apocalyptic violence. The sublime ending – its atmosphere of dread and horror subdued by twisting rhetorical summations – captures the dialectic of skepticism and the sublime. The illegibility of private experience – with its explosive possibilities – provides a fitting conclusion to a book about skeptical doubt in early modern English literature.

This chapter explores the notion of a private language as a way to achieve perfect communication and defeat skepticism. Borrowing from Wittgenstein's idea of private language as interpreted by Stanley Cavell, the chapter argues that Shakespeare and Donne experiment with an elusive tongue so as to investigate the possibility of Edenic intimacy in marriage. Each imagines a sublime and transparent marital union as overcoming the problem of other minds, but each represents this in opposed ways. In “The Phoenix and Turtle” Shakespeare creates the semblance of a private language by a virtuoso tour of poetic genres. His lyric thus entertains a Wittgensteinian puzzle: namely, that genre, the most consensual of linguistic conventions, can resist signification and become an abstruse language game. In “The Ecstasy,” by contrast, Donne invents an arcane dialect for his true lovers, showing private language in action, until he turns to the body for more complete erotic communication. Shakespeare’s and Donne’s contested engagements with skepticism and with deferred or partial knowledge inform the way these two poems parry the temptations of a private language.

Spenser’s poetry offers a glimpse into the aesthetics of skepticism. To understand Spenser’s exploration of perception, interpretation, and subjective experience, the chapter considers skeptical questions posed by medieval philosophy regarding universals, abstraction, mental language, the status of pictures in the mind, and the extent of God’s power. According to Heiko Oberman’s view of the via moderna, these nominalist investigations with their counterfactual approach lead to feelings of contingency and autonomy that in turn produce the subversive political idea that things can be otherwise. In his translations of du Bellay and Marot in his Complaints and in “November,” as well as on Mount Acidale in The Fairy Queen and in The Mutability Cantos, Spenser creates rapturous visions that soon dissolve. These intimations of the sublime have a skeptical quality that suggest a grounding in nominalism. Because Heidegger combats a skeptical metaphysics premised on the rift between subject and object, this chapter uses aspects of his philosophical lexicon to illuminate the stakes of Spenser’s poetic travail with problems of truth, concealment, disclosure, and fullness of being.

This chapter argues that Andrew Marvell’s skepticism hones an aesthetic sensibility attuned to the sublime effects of fluctuating appearances, a skeptical apprehension of the sublime that contributes to the budding culture of taste. Giorgio Agamben supports the linking of skepticism and aesthetics since he sees taste as “an excessive sense, situated at the very limit of knowledge and pleasure,” explaining that “aesthetics takes as its object a knowledge that is not known” (2017, 51, 66). Marvell’s lyric poetry demonstrates the aesthetic pleasures afforded by a skeptical sensibility, even as it charts the emergence of the aesthete from the godly individual struggling to understand radical historical change and his role in the divine plan. Certain poems explore the intersections of secular and kairotic time, terms borrowed from Charles Taylor. His spectator poems show how the problematics of vision become secularized. If the deceptions of the eye in prior decades elicited the correction of both religious reformers and the early scientific establishment, here the wayward gaze is no longer an obstacle to truthful perception, but rather an occasion for enchantment.

Herbert of Cherbury saw himself as a peacemaker. In De Veritate (1624) Herbert posits that religious conflict will disappear once people realize that they share core beliefs, monotheistic essentials he dubs the Common Notions in a nod to Stoicism. He proposes to refute skepticism by isolating criteria for truthful cognition: chiefly, conformity and consent. Why did Herbert, a champion of truth and enemy of skepticism, end up embracing skeptical impartiality and neutrality? The chapter argues that Herbert changes owing to his experiences during the Civil War and as a diplomat, but also following his work of the 1630s, composing his histories:Expedition to the Isle of Rhé and The Life and Reign of Henry VIII. Yet the seeds for this change are already present in his philosophy of mind, growing out of the appreciation for beauty implicit in his ideals of conformity and consent. The chapter shows that the corollaries of Herbert’s philosophy extend beyond political accommodation to neutrality and aesthetic detachment. Herbert’s work constitutes a valuable case-study of the connections forged between epistemology and politics in the turbulent second quarter of the seventeenth century.

Chapter 4 offers a new approach to Margaret Cavendish’s skepticism, focusing on rhetorical strategies of “reoccupation” – a term coined by Hans Blumenberg to understand how seventeenth-century thinkers coped with unresolved questions inherited from medieval nominalism. For Cavendish reoccupation is a way to manage doubt and uncertainty; it involves the appropriation of roles, tropes, plot devices and other textual conventions deemed inadequate or hollow. By analyzing metaphors and topoi from The Blazing World and elsewhere, the chapter shows how reoccupation operates in her work, dramatizing the resolution of crises in authority. Her rejection of Epicurean atomism and her embrace of vitalist materialism correspond to her predilection for reoccupation as a literary device and psychological stance. The chapter also examines her parodies of political theology and sovereignty, thereby offering support for Blumenberg’s arguments against Carl Schmitt. The chapter situates the Duchess of Newcastle’s self-assertion and desire for fame within larger structural patterns of secularization. The coda compares Herbert and Cavendish vis-à-vis Jacques Rancière’s comments on the English Revolution.