Early Modern Scepticism and the Culture of Paradox.

In an epoch of dramatic transition from one cultural system to another, when the remains of a late medieval frame coexisted with new and uncontrollable drives towards the refashioning of the entire episteme, paradox as a mode of thinking and configuring experience came to mirror the volatilisation of received knowledge at the root of an increasing epistemological instability. Competing world-pictures favoured a growing perception of contradiction at the foundations of a fast changing reality whose ever new irreconcilable views made stable knowing and judgment impossible. Scepticism was the philosophical outcome of the logical impasse of paradox, which, combined with a pervasive rhetoric of contraries, sneaked into all forms of artistic or argumentative discourse, now taking the shape of a new vogue of literary mock encomiums, now the guise of logical nonsenses and figures of doxastic contradiction. For sure, it acquired a fundamental role in the writings of the age, providing a link between a new sensibility of doubt and its conceptual and discursive articulation. This journal issue concentrates on how scepticism interacted with a culture of paradox, in order to explore the diverse ways in which an increasingly sceptical frame of mind in early modern England coupled with, and was expressed by, new literary forms, shaping up a culture of contraries that traversed, and joined together, different areas of intellectual and popular productions: from drama to poetry and literary paradoxes, as well as to theoretical writings.