About

Kathryn Murphy will be discussing themes from her forthcoming book, The Tottering Universal: Metaphysical Prose in the Seventeenth Century, which addresses the philosophical and stylistic complexities of 17th century prose. It examines the ways in which seventeenth-century writers responded to what I call 'the anxiety of variety' – the concern that the human intellect can never be adequate to the teeming, various, incorrigibly plural world – and how they developed a vernacular philosophical style from the generative tension between traditional Aristotelian styles of thinking, and new discourses of experience and experiment. There are chapters on John Florio and Michel de Montaigne, Lancelot Andrewes, Francis Bacon, Robert Burton, Thomas Browne, and John Milton.

A Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Oxford, Dr Murphy is a literary critic and scholar with interests in several areas: literature and philosophy in the seventeenth century; the genre of the essay, from Montaigne to the present; letters and alphabets, written, printed, engraved, baked, stitched, heard, and imagined; the production of images as ways of thinking or representing knowledge, especially in the early modern period, and even more especially in still life; and the relationship between poetic form, rhetorical figure, and theological and philosophical ideas.

NB. Free ticket for low income and carers