The Humanities As a Transcending Study: How Early English Books Have Cultivated My Understanding of Research

In it, on page 293, he writes in the chapter “Of Studies:” “Some bookes are to be Tasted, Others to be Swallowed, and Some Few to be Chewed and Digested: That is, some Bookes are to be read onely in Parts; Others to be read but not Curiously; And some Few to be read wholly, and with Diligence and Attention.” Bacon’s sentiments are noteworthy for me in that, for much of my public education, English classes revolved around the notion that whichever book is assigned is to be read wholly. In eighth grade, for example, we read Lois Lower’s The Giver in my Pre-AP English class. Regardless of my personal opinions of the book or its relative importance to me at the time, I was taught to seriously analyze the novel, every chapter and every line within it. The same would hold true later, notably in a dual credit English literature class I took my senior year of high school when my class was assigned to read, among other works, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; (I shall let you speculate which of the two I believed should be tasted rather than read with diligence and attention.

But university studies have influenced, if not altered, this high school maxim. I, and most university students generally, have written papers in which the research is narrow in nature and constrained in context. It is the university student’s onus to sift through databases in search for small snippets of knowledge that coincide with the topic of the research paper their professor has assigned. Works not in the textbook or part of the main curriculum are studied, not in the context of the entirety of the work, but rather, in the context of a few sentences relevant to the sentences before and after it in the paper. This is not necessarily bad (or true in every single case), but, as I major in philosophy — a major that I often joke about in that “I will not to have a job after I graduate” — and work in a collaborative dedicated to the humanities, it is worth exploring why the research I am doing now and the research my fellow students are doing is stereotypically undervalued and what course of action is necessary to change these sentiments.

If anyone had suggested to me a few months ago that I should be diving deep into old books documented in a database called Early English Books Online (EEBO) I might have laughed at that person. In the philosophy classes I have taken at the University, there are quite a number of early English philosophers I have read but no course has been dedicated to, say, John Locke, and I have never found myself having to read all 310 pages of Concerning Human Understanding for a paper or even an entire paragraph; I’ve dealt in snippets at most. However, for the last few months, I have been working with Dr. Andrew Fleck in compiling a database of early English books with paratextual prose and verse. Our method to create this database does not require that I read each work cover to cover; doing so for the works of Francis Bacon alone would take a lifetime. But I often find myself enthralled by some of the contents I find while looking for paratexts, which are materials that surround the main text of a literary work. Our research began in looking for early books relating to the history of astronomy to coincide with this year’s transit of Mercury phenomenon. And while I am not one to claim any knowledge in the science — other than being able to name the planets in our solar system — I found myself working with other books that deal with, what we would now call, astrology and religion. A short work by Henry Jessey published in 1648 entitled A Scripture almanack reconciles the astrological zodiacs which passages in the Holy Bible and explores, for example, the mythological Mars side-by-side with biblical Moses. Further, I find books like one entitled The Mirrour of True Nobility and Gentility, written in 1657 by Pierre Gassendi, which beautifully explores the life of parliamentarian and historian Nicolaus Claudius Fabricius, working their way into my personal reading.

The research I am doing for the Collaborative is systematically different than that for a paper. When I open up a database like EEBO or the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), I am not typing in narrow concepts that would contribute to a thesis statement or looking for specific parts of a specific work. Rather, I am typing in vague, enormously complicated subjects that lead me to finding works I may have never crossed paths with prior. Even as I continue my studies in philosophy, books from Bacon, such as the aforementioned The Essays, are entirely new to me and I have found them, because my own interest, worth to be wholly and studied further than what the scope of the research demands. This is not to say that every book I have looked through for paratext is personally regarded in this way. On the contrary, a good sum of them are in my memory for no reason other than they now are recorded in the database, (“simply tasted,” to use Bacon’s line). But those that are now placed in the shelves of my mental library are there because of how Dr. Fleck and I have conducted the research thus far.

This is not a privilege I have had in most of the classes I have taken that have required research because these types of reading are not, quote-unquote relevant. I have not been expected, for example, in Introduction to Ethics to read more than what has been provided in the textbook: segments of the writings of famous philosophers on the matter. In the same manner, I would not expect, for example, a student of the College of Science to find any need to read a book that isn’t a scientific textbook or peer-reviewed research paper concerning their topic. The two are not separated in this regard. However, a primary and secondary public educational system which places heavy emphasis on studying the sciences and mathematics, (so-called S.T.E.M. fields), and often disregards studies in the humanities (that which is human: the arts, religion, philosophy, language, literature, etc.) as “less-than” cannot expect a college population to deem them necessary to their own education. And, a collegiate educational system whose humanities courses are just as narrow in nature cannot expect their students to deem the sciences necessary to their own education either.

In humanities research, we must be careful to look beyond distinctions between field of study or specialty of practice. Indeed, in all things there is the human essence behind it, moving it along to better understand the world and we must do our best to understand it. Research in the humanities can only be valuable to others not privy to the same study if the value is mutual. As Dr. Fleck and I have explored, behind every science is a mythology written thousands of years prior; behind every equation a calculation explored in old literature long forgotten; behind every type of communication theory another theory lost to history. Research across all fields must reflect this reality, and as researchers of the humanities, we must encourage such wide-ranging explorations. We must emphasize that research is not a narrow stream, rather a dive into a pool of collective knowledge that is mutually beneficial for all swimming in it. And in this, to be true to Bacon, we must move away from a simple tasting or forced swallowing of the works that we read for our research. Research cannot be concluded once the last sentence of the paper has been given a period. It must be a never- ending, lifelong exploration into the subject matter, regardless of where it leads. In doing this, our research as humanitarians is no longer constrained to fellow humanitarians. The works of Pierre Gassendi are relevant to an environmental sciences major as are the writings in the International Journal of Environmental Science and Technology are to a philosophy major.

Written by J.J. Martinez, The University of Texas at El Paso
Undergraduate Research Fellow, The Humanities Collaborative at EPCC-UTEP

(Banner and headline image: Portrait of Sir Francis Bacon by Pourbus the Younger in 1617. [Public domain])