1st Edition
Timothie Bright and the Origins of Early Modern Shorthand Melancholy, Medicines, and the Information of the Soul
In Timothie Bright and the Origins of Early Modern Shorthand, J.D. Fleming brings together two areas of sixteenth-century intellectual history. One is the period emergence of artificial systems for verbatim shorthand notation—a crucial episode in the history of information. The other is the ancient medical discourse of melancholy humour, or black bile. Timothie Bright (1550–1615), physician and priest, prompts the juxtaposition. For he was the author, not only of the period’s original shorthand manual—Characterie (1588)—but also of the first book in English on the dark humour: The Treatise of Melancholy (1586).
Bright’s account of melancholy involves a cybernetic phenomenology of the human. Essentially, we are psyches (souls or minds). We are sealed off from our bodies, operating them as automata across an interface. Psychological presence, for Bright, is illusion and pathology. Engrossing performances or representations therefore bring great danger, and so does the doctrine of predestination—less for its content than its typical delivery. Painful preaching was indispensable in sixteenth-century English Protestantism. But it falls foul of Bright’s proscriptions. These are followed by his publication of the first known system for verbatim shorthand notation since antiquity, its technique heavily inflected toward a vocabulary of the pulpit. The passionate, oral performance of the inspired preacher receives an unprecedented textual preservative—and prophylactic. Bright’s technology of information serves his phenomenology of alienation.
This book will be of interest to students and scholars of the early modern period, the tradition of melancholy, and the history of information—as theory, and technology.
Introduction
The Double physician
Informatio medici
Messages and meanings
From hand to soul
Part One: Technology
1. The Seventeenth-Century Shorthand Movement: In Four Corners
A Protean art
Yet shorter
Groovy images
Another way to the word
2. “My Invention”: What Was Characterie?
Verbatim notation
Informational exchange
Hybrid publishing
Innovation
Source
3. “Indifferently Affected”: The Characterie Terms
Wanting an alphabet
De arte combinatoria
A Book of lists
Writing sermons
Orality and control
Mere information
Part Two: Theory
4. Against Navigation: English Medicines
The Medical background, ca. 1580
An English Galenism, 1574
The Paracelsian difference, 1585
TEM (i) Aut externi orbis
(ii) Here be (no) serpents
5. “Never Able to Abide”: The Melancholy Conscience
The Medical Tradition: Natural, genial, adust
The Literary Valence: Euphues his face
Treatment: Going on a data
TMel (i) “Saving that”
(ii) “No medicine, no purgation, no cordial”
(iii) “Spectacles are to be shunned”
(iv) “In written words revealed”
6. “The Mechenist”: Not Being There
TMel (v) The Natural chemist
(vi) Invisible seeds
(vii) Bright’s spirit
(viii) Faculty and instruments
(ix) In machina
(x) Serenity of the spotless psyche
(xi) Information overload
Conclusion
Appendices
1. Sixteenth-Century English shorthands before Bright’s? The absence of evidence.
2. Lists of the Characterie terms.
3. Bright on “soul” and “mind.”
Bibliography
Biography
James Dougal Fleming is Professor of English Literature at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. His research is primarily in early modern intellectual history, with an emphasis on epistemic issues surrounding, and arising from, the Scientific Revolution. His previous books are Milton’s Secrecy and Philosophical Hermeneutics (2008), The Mirror of Information in Early Modern England: John Wilkins and the Universal Character (2017), and (ed. and intro.) The Invention of Discovery, 1500–1700 (2011).
