Introduction: New Directions in the Study of New World Knowledge Making Free

An intriguing digression punctuates Edward Waterhouse’s account of the 1622 Powhatan Uprising, the attack on the Virginia colony by members of the Powhatan paramount chiefdom that claimed the lives of 347 English settlers and forcefully repudiated their encroachments into the southern Algonquian homelands of Tsenacommacah. Noting that the Powhatans had “carried away” several of the colonists’ “Peeces [guns] with munition (the use whereof they know not),” Waterhouse (1622: 21) reports that their “King,” Opechancanough, successor of the chiefdom’s eponymous leader and architect of the uprising, “caused the most part of the Gunpowder by him surprized [captured], to bee sowne, to draw therefrom the like increase, as of his Maize or Corne, in Harvest next.”¹ Apparently regarding the human-made chemical explosive and quintessential colonizer technology of gunpowder as a seed, the Indigenous ruler attempts, in Waterhouse’s telling, to multiply this unfamiliar substance—and the tactical advantage it affords—through a familiar technique of proliferation: he plants it in the ground in the hope that it will grow.²

The story receives no further elaboration in Waterhouse’s text, but its complexities (which I return to below) evoke a burgeoning area of academic inquiry: the investigation of what people in the past knew and how they came to know it. This special issue of American Literature takes stock of a major trend in the field centered on these concerns, the wealth of recent work on New World knowledge production that my coeditor Ralph Bauer and I call the “epistemological turn” in early American literary studies. Over the past two decades, early Americanists have set their sights on knowledge. Building on influential work in the history of science, scholars such as Bauer (2003, 2019), Susan Scott Parrish (2006), Sarah Rivett (2011, 2017), Cristobal Silva (2011), Andrew S. Curran (2011), Christopher P. Iannini (2012), Kelly Wisecup (2013, 2021), Molly Farrell (2016), Britt Rusert (2017), Greta LaFleur (2018), Allison Margaret Bigelow (2020), Yarí Pérez Marín (2020), and Sara E. Johnson (2023) have recovered the significant role that the crucibles of New World colonialism and Atlantic slavery played in a Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment long misrepresented as a strictly European affair, neatly conforming to anachronistic disciplinary divides and straightforwardly reflecting modernity’s supposedly secularizing tendencies.

Marrying science studies’ insights into the social construction of knowledge with postcolonial studies’ insights into the contingent operations of power, specialists in the Americas’ various literatures have reframed epistemology as a site of cultural production, political conflict, and historical change. Embracing the predisciplinarity of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the interdisciplinarity of the eighteenth and nineteenth, these scholars have examined recognizably scientific discourses such as natural history, medicine, astronomy, and mineralogy, as well as ones we would regard today as theological, occult, pseudoscientific, anthropological, economic, political, and aesthetic: from works on witch hunting, alchemy, and phrenology to ethnographies, population studies, government reports, and early novels. And instead of taking the increasing circulation of knowledge as the calling card of religion’s retreat from modern life, they have probed its persistent cross-fertilization with faith among Christians and non-Christians alike, showing that naturalistic investigation was pursued as an act of worship, exegesis, divination, and demonology and that practices of spiritual devotion were energized by new techniques of empirical observation, geographic exploration, mathematical quantification, and controlled experiment. The result has been a significant expansion of the texts, contexts, ideas, and historical actors falling under the umbrella of early American literature, along with new occasions to reflect on the field’s signature method: historically contextualized close reading, often of nonbelletristic works and frequently informed by a hermeneutics of suspicion.

This special issue, titled “The Epistemological Turn in Early American Literary Studies,” brings together prominent and rising participants in the epistemological turn to assess where this scholarly trend has been and where it is headed. We have construed both the field and the trend broadly, framing early American literary studies in chronologically, geographically, linguistically, culturally, and formally capacious terms and taking Western science to be but one avatar of an expansive category of knowledge making available for analysis. Our account of the epistemological turn is intended to be neither comprehensive nor prescriptive. We have identified studies we take to be representative of its concerns, approaches, and methods, but more examples might be adduced, and its parameters might be refined in various ways. Scholarship in this vein shares no particular critical orientation or predetermined agenda beyond its investment in knowledge making as an object of study. Nonetheless, it is possible to generalize in retrospect about its sources of inspiration and impact on the field. A reflection of the rising prestige of the sciences vis-à-vis the humanities, of the looming climate crisis, of the information-management challenges of the Internet age, and of broad trends in philosophy, sociology, and intellectual history, the epistemological turn in early American literary studies takes the competition and cross-pollination of knowledge systems as a window into the emergence of modernity. And the revisionist portrait of modernity it has produced thus far has centered on communities’ confrontations with formerly unknown cultures and phenomena, on the interconnections between seemingly discrete social spheres, and on a set of evolving rather than waning orientations toward the divine. Bookended by this introduction and an afterword by Bauer, the six articles featured here by Jeffrey Glover, Jennifer Rae Greeson, Liz Polcha, Ruth Hill, Sarah Rivett, and Kimberly Takahata showcase the dynamism and diversity of current scholarship on knowledge production in the Americas circa 1580–1850, especially insofar as they exemplify the three aforementioned themes: epistemology’s political dimensions in the age of colonialism and slavery, its persistent interdisciplinarity, and its enduring spirituality.

Our special issue builds on past scholarly fora such as James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew’s 2008 edited collection Science and Empire in the Atlantic World and the 2019 special issue of Early American Literature titled “The New Natural History,” edited by Michael Boyden. But by looking beyond familiar scientific institutions and emphasizing early colonial archives, we hope to foreground a wider array of epistemologies, to pluralize science as scientiae—or, better yet, to trade in the rather limiting idea of science for the more inclusive concept of knowledge (Burke 2016; Daston 2017; Popper 2021). Intellectual debates were staged not just in the controlled environment of the scientific laboratory, the pages of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions, and the curated collections of the museum, botanical garden, or cabinet of curiosities but also in alternative spaces of experiment and assemblage and in nonscientific genres that bear science’s imprint (and imprinted upon it in turn): the missionary tract, political report, linguistic grammar, captivity narrative, sermon, poem, or work of fiction. As we will see, some of the most exciting recent epistemologically oriented scholarship deals with knowledge produced on Caribbean plantations; in South American mines; during settler surveying expeditions; inside courtrooms, convents, and ships’ holds; and in Indigenous and African enclaves to which colonizers had minimal access. At the same time, our special issue finds common ground amidst this archival diversity by focusing on the shared methods of literary studies.

While the field of early American history has undoubtedly experienced an epistemological turn of its own, evident in the work of Joyce E. Chaplin (2001), Neil Safier (2008), Walter W. Woodward (2010), Pablo F. Gómez (2017), Cameron B. Strang (2018), and Delbourgo (2006, 2017) himself, literary scholars have made unique contributions by virtue of their distinct techniques of interpretation. In the case of early Anglo-American literary studies, for instance, a foundational investment in bringing formalist methods to bear on nonbelletristic texts—especially the theological corpus of Puritan New England and the political print of the American Revolution—eased the turn to scientific writing while maintaining the primacy of close reading. And this tendency was reinforced when the field’s hemispheric, transnational, transatlantic, and circum-Caribbean turns made a host of new scientific and science-adjacent texts available for study, from José de Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590) and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Lettres d’un cultivateur Americain (1784) to Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626) and Richard Ligon’s True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657). As a result, literary historians not only of the British Americas but also of the Spanish and French Americas have generated new insights about archives once monopolized by historians while also enriching the genealogies of traditionally “literary” genres like the novel (Iannini 2012: 38–40, 55–61; Ryan 2020) and the georgic (Goodman 2004; Sweet 2013). In what follows, I contextualize the epistemological turn and unpack some of its major tendencies and findings to date, and I use Edward Waterhouse’s gunpowder anecdote and the exciting work being done in the special issue’s contributing articles to reflect on where scholarship on New World knowledge production might be headed in its third decade.

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The epistemological turn in early American literary studies was made possible by a series of prior developments. Once the field of science studies itself became thinkable, through a refusal to exempt science from the constructivist claims made about other areas of human culture, scholars sought to expand the story’s cast of characters, looking beyond elite male Euro-Christian knowledge makers to the era’s various forms of “vernacular science” (Tilley 2010).³ Most important, they began to account for globalization’s impact on the history of science and thus to revise Eurocentric metanarratives that neglected the coincident unfolding of colonial expansion and the Scientific Revolution. This shift began with brief gestures toward the fact that Columbus’s 1492 “discovery” exacerbated doubts about the infallibility of text-bound ancient wisdom and accelerated the rise of empiricism as the cornerstone of the scientific method (Shapin 1996; Dear 2001). But it fell to early Americanists to nuance the story of New World knowledge making: to illuminate its specific mechanisms and conditions of possibility, to outline its local and regional variations, and to situate it alongside other intellectual traditions in the hemisphere.

A number of books published in the wake of the Columbian quincentenary began this important work. Pioneering studies by Mary Louise Pratt (1992), James E. McClellan III (1992), Denise Albanese (1996), Richard Drayton (2000), and Londa Schiebinger (2004) presented early modern science as inextricable from colonialism, slavery, and capitalist resource extraction.⁴ Taking up this mantle, literary historians such as Bauer (2003) and Parrish (2006) complicated center-periphery models of epistemological exchange, exploring how elite colonists and creoles manipulated, circumvented, and satirized their subordination to the metropole and how European women, lower-class white men, and Indigenous and enslaved African people parlayed the cache of eyewitness experience into small pockets of autonomy and privilege within imperial hierarchies designed to exploit their knowledge, as well as their lands and labor. As the epistemological turn hit its stride thereafter, the relationship between knowledge and power remained a central preoccupation.

Linking the vaunted scientific achievements of Paris or London to colonialism was a relatively straightforward prospect for scholars of Franco- and Anglo-America writing in the wake of science studies’ globalization (Safier 2008; Delbourgo 2017).⁵ But at the same moment, Latin Americanists were forced to combat the marginalization of metropolitan, as well as colonial, Spanish and Portuguese contributions to early science. Work by Juan Pimentel (2000), Ruth Hill (2000, 2018), Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (2006a), Antonio Barrera-Osorio (2006), María M. Portuondo (2009), and Daniela Bleichmar (2012; see also Bleichmar et al., 2008) dismantled the Protestant exceptionalist and Francocentric scripting of the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment by demonstrating that Portugal and Spain not only had participated in scientific modernity but had done so through their imperial activities. In addition to highlighting the scientific bona fides of Ibero-American Catholics, early Latin Americanists have set an important example when it comes to the study of Indigenous and African contributions to Western science, especially as translators, and autonomous non-European traditions of thought and inscription (Boone and Mignolo 1994; Marroquín Arredondo and Bauer 2019; Bigelow 2020). Thus, Gómez (2017) identified a diasporic African system of healing, steeped in experientialism yet distinct from European empiricism, flourishing in seventeenth-century Cartagena. These scholars have also helped broaden the meaning of science in an era before disciplinary specialization. Thus, Barrera-Osorio (2006) characterized Spain’s Casa de la Contratación (House of Trade) as the empire’s most significant scientific clearinghouse, a space where economic data, technical expertise, and natural knowledge commingled. Likewise, Latin Americanists have discredited the perceived incompatibility between natural scientific inquiry and Catholic “superstition” (Cañizares-Esguerra 2006b: 120–77). In short, Ibero-American science has begun to escape its former disregard and become an essential part of the story of New World knowledge making.

As more transnational, translinguistic, and transconfessional work on epistemological topics has emerged (Bauer 2003; Brickhouse 2014; Rivett 2017), our three key themes of imperial politics, interdisciplinarity, and postsecularism have surfaced again and again. Scholarship associated with the epistemological turn’s first wave broke new ground regarding the politics of knowledge making. Wisecup (2013) explored the comparable processes of epistemological adaptation that diasporic Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans used to explain the new sociomedical circumstances created by their mutual encounter. Rusert (2017) tracked a counterculture of empirical inquiry that allowed Black thinkers excluded from traditional scientific contexts to refute the kind of race science examined by Curran (2011). Pérez Marín (2020) located an origin for criollo literary expression in early modern Mexican medical and surgical texts. And Johnson (2023) recovered the vibrant constellation of African-descended people who made the French Caribbean philosophe Moreau de Saint-Méry’s intellectual output possible. All of this special issue’s contributing articles indicate that knowledge making continues to be a useful site for understanding New World hierarchy and its contestation: from Takahata’s meditation on the ethnographic gaze and Glover’s interrogation of the epistemology of enslavement to Greeson’s claims about the scientific roots of corporate colonial possession and Hill’s account of the dual colonization of the heavens and the earth.

Participants in the epistemological turn have also embraced the interdisciplinary category of knowledge over the narrower idea of science, using traditionally scientific texts to gather insight about other areas of human life or looking beyond those genres altogether. For example, Iannini (2012) argued that natural history writing provided a heuristic for pondering the ethical conundrum of circum-Caribbean slavery by incorporating representational strategies such as emblematic reading that allowed for its oblique evocation. LaFleur (2018), meanwhile, identified the racially inflected and environmentally determinist discourse of natural history as the premier forum for discussing sexuality before the advent of sexology. And Farrell (2016) traced modern techniques of population quantification back to colonial strategies for partitioning intermingling communities through the enumeration of bodies. Scholars have also examined knowledge making as it relates to ecological issues and associated questions of personhood (Allewaert 2013; Ziser 2013; Dauer 2019) and practices of curation and compilation (Ross 2019; Wisecup 2021). Parrish (2010) and I (Mazzaferro 2018) have explored early modern modes of political knowledge making that used natural scientific methods to hone new techniques of governance in the colonies. And even scholars working in the nineteenth-century heyday of specialization have charted connections between the sciences and other disciplines (Murison 2011; Altschuler 2018; Fraser 2021; Orr 2023). As the articles in this special issue by Polcha, Greeson, Glover, and Rivett make clear, the latest epistemologically oriented scholarship is stretching the category of knowledge making even further, into architecture, economics, legal thought, folklore, and beyond.

And much the same can be said for the postsecular bent of the epistemological turn. Scholars have demonstrated that spirituality not only coexisted with knowledge making but also spurred and shaped it. Rivett (2011) argued that the seemingly archaic search for evidence of divine grace in the souls of Puritan converts in seventeenth-century New England was actually informed by a cutting-edge strand of metropolitan British science. Silva (2011) uncovered a colonial providentialist narratology patterned on epidemiology. And Bauer’s (2019) investigation of the links between alchemy and imperial conquest revealed at every turn the profound intertwining of science and religion. Once again, our contributors are perpetuating this trend, showing that esoteric Christian concepts could guide scientific theories about infinite space and plural worlds (Hill), that the built environment of a colonial convent could convey insidious forms of social knowledge (Polcha), that supernatural associations could saturate Enlightenment natural history (Rivett), and that a well-worn biblical maxim could prompt counterfactual thinking about the evils of slavery (Glover). In sum, the epistemological turn continues to promote a profoundly political, interdisciplinary, and spiritual conception of modernity.

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We asked our contributors to use a case study from their research to reflect on the state of the field of early American literary studies as it has been enriched by a focus on knowledge making. The articles that resulted provide an illuminating cross section of the field’s liberating archival breadth while nonetheless being united by their dedication to literary studies methods. Drawing on history of science scholarship but considering the rise of empiricism in a much wider frame, Jeffrey Glover’s article explores the shifting epistemological foundations of the earliest debates about the ethics of slaveholding in the English Atlantic. He contends that observation’s rising currency allowed certain Quaker and Puritan writers in seventeenth-century North America to question the assumption that all enslaved Africans had been combatants in a just war taken captive in lieu of execution. Reconfiguring the moral conundrum of slave procurement as a problem of knowledge, these writers marshaled unattributed eyewitness testimony about the slave trade—known in juridical contexts as hearsay—and the thought experiment of the Golden Rule (Matthew 7:12) to force their readers to ponder the risks that purchasing potentially illegitimate captives posed to their own salvation and freedom. At the same time, Glover suggests, vivifying the remote scenes of African warfare through the rhetoric, if not the actual practice, of credible eyewitnessing was double-edged, providing evidence of Black brutality useful to slavery’s defenders as well as its critics. Examining texts written long before the antislavery movement’s late eighteenth and nineteenth-century zenith, the article provides a new angle on slavery’s rise and fall by showing that competing epistemologies organized controversies well beyond the strictly scientific realm.

Focused on an even earlier theater of American knowledge making, Jennifer Rae Greeson’s piece investigates the links between the Renaissance polymath Thomas Harriot’s scientific training and his involvement with the first Virginia colonization efforts. Remedying a persistent disconnect between work in the history of European science and American literary studies—an inversion of the earlier occlusion of New World contributors to the Scientific Revolution that downplays the colonialist activities of major metropolitan natural philosophers—she argues for the coarticulation of corporate plantation capitalism and the New Science. Harriot pioneered new forms of empiricism in the context of Walter Ralegh’s late sixteenth-century attempt to secure the vast capital necessary for a new form of colonization rooted in settlement rather than trade or mineral extraction. By attending to the economic sections of Harriot’s Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588, 1590) that scholars often ignore, Greeson charts how a transformation in English imperial practice redefined how knowledge was made and used. When Francis Bacon codified this shift as the scientific method in the decades that followed, that watershed reflected a similar intimacy with the Virginia project: his influential epistemology was one that equated knowledge and power in the most brutal and, after 1622, genocidal sense.

Employing a similarly expansive definition of knowledge making, Liz Polcha’s contribution uses the case study of the Ursuline convent in early eighteenth-century French New Orleans to consider colonial architecture as an epistemology implicated in enduring legacies of environmental destruction and racial and gender hierarchy. The physical structure of the convent and the various forms of documentary evidence that projected its imperfectly fulfilled purposes played host to both scientific endeavors and imperial activities: they facilitated cartographic, natural historical, and ethnographic knowledge acquisition and, through them, the rational gridding of “wild” New World space at the expense of local ecologies, Indigenous sovereignty, and Black and female freedom. Analyzing a wide range of sources, Polcha argues that the built environment encodes social knowledge, making certain arrangements commonsensical at the expense of others: the subordination of nonwhite to white, the necessity of policing women’s sexuality, and the relentless extraction of natural resources. And yet, she concludes, it is the very messiness of this archive—its stylistic variety, its interdisciplinarity, its unfinishedness—that allows us to recognize the profound contingency of colonial attempts to regulate bodies and resources through the epistemological mastery of physical space.

Ibero-America takes center stage in Ruth Hill’s article, which examines the overlooked discipline of gnomonics—the use of sundials for scientific measurement and projection—in an underappreciated context for early American knowledge making: seventeenth-century Jesuit scientific networks. She uses the career of Valentin Stansel, a German Jesuit astronomer working in colonial Brazil, to revise secularist and Anglo- and Francocentric accounts of the Scientific Revolution. Central here is the framework of eclecticism, a mode of early modern intellectual accommodation that rendered disparate belief systems compatible and therefore generated surprising forms of agreement and exchange across the science/religion and Catholic/Protestant divides. Through a richly contextualized reading of Stansel’s works, especially the devout narrative of imaginary lunar travel that he penned in Bahia in the 1680s, Hill proposes a new way of understanding the epistemological significance of colonial distance from the metropole. New World residence offers Stansel an opportunity not only to exalt eyewitnessing and satirize rival European thinkers through denigrating comparisons to Black and Indigenous people but also to engage in the ecstatic projection of spaces no one could physically inhabit. In particular, his situation prompts contemplation of the moon, a locale that shared with the “new world” of the Americas a beguiling remoteness (foreshortened by the recent invention of the telescope) and a tantalizing prospect of pious conquest according to a Christian imperialist worldview.

If Hill’s article makes an understudied scientific discipline more familiar, Sarah Rivett’s makes a familiar one more strange. Rivett takes up the figure of the raven in eighteenth-century European ornithology and the oral folklore of the Indigenous Pacific Northwest, placing these two knowledge traditions side by side to illuminate disavowed similarities and crucial differences. On the one hand, she detects a set of supernatural meanings permeating the putatively secular discipline of Enlightenment natural history—an association of the raven with sin and a severing of the species from its maritime environment traceable to Augustine’s commentaries on Genesis, present in the writings of naturalists such as Thomas Jefferson and the Comte de Buffon, and still visible in the folk biology of sailors in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851). On the other hand, she recovers an alternative conception of the raven in the story cycles of Haida and Tlingit communities. Here, the bird is a trickster who inhabits the region’s intertidal zones in tales about creation, communal relations, and environmental balance, an adaptive agent of both disturbance and socioecological integrity who transgresses Western science’s imagined boundaries between land and water and natural and supernatural. Rivett’s comparison thus breaks the Euro-Christian monopoly on legitimate knowledge making by centering a non-Western epistemology that shares natural history’s spirituality yet lacks its domineering and acquisitive tendencies.

Finally, Kimberly Takahata’s contribution tracks the failures of observation that disrupt John Gabriel Stedman’s 1796 Narrative, of a Five Years’ Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam and outlines an alternative mode of literary analysis that makes a virtue of the text’s inability to produce stable knowledge about the region’s Indigenous inhabitants. She contends that Stedman overpromises and underdelivers as an eyewitness. In keeping with the empiricist bent of natural history writing and related genres of colonial reportage, the Narrative stakes its authority on its author’s firsthand access to its New World subjects. Yet Kalina and Lokono people prove inaccessible to Stedman, prompting an uptick in his citation of prior accounts and therefore a substitution of published stereotypes for experiential particulars. Takahata instrumentalizes this impasse to forward an interpretive method that respects the limits of what cannot be known about Native Americans, suggesting that their obscure presence in the text may reflect an evasion of the colonizer’s gaze, a repudiation of the extractive logic that governed imperial epistemologies as much as imperial economies. By refraining from filling in these literary silences, scholars can disengage from inherited settler-colonial knowledge structures. In this way, her piece makes explicit a line of questioning taken up by all of our contributors about the relationship between knowledge making in the past and our attempts to make knowledge about it in the present.

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Returning to Edward Waterhouse’s 1622 gunpowder anecdote helps flesh out these trends and forecast others. The story exemplifies the politics of knowledge making in the context of colonialism. It concerns a technology that straddles the boundaries between science and other cultural sectors (politics, war, agriculture, myth). And its clash of cultures tacitly pits two rival divinities against one another: the Christian God’s providential care for his Chosen versus the supposedly satanic and ineffectual deities of the Powhatans. Moreover, the story evokes three additional themes taken up by our contributors: commensurability, credibility, and accessibility.

First, while Waterhouse (1622: 21) is eager to present the resistance leader Opechancanough’s decision to sow gunpowder as an example of Indigenous ignorance—a specimen of all “they know not” implicitly contrasted with the lofty attainments of European science—that act also resonates as an expression of Indigenous curiosity, resourcefulness, and intellectual potential. Waterhouse insists that although the Powhatans have won the physical battle, they have lost the intellectual war: their faulty understanding of a key martial technology foretells their downfall. Yet flawed though it may be in the objective sense that the sociology of scientific knowledge has taught us to bracket (i.e., planted gunpowder won’t grow), Opechancanough’s hypothesis is commonsensical and astute; the trial he devises for it resembles nothing so much as the experimentalism of the Scientific Revolution; and its disappointing outcome would nonetheless have been informative. When we consider knowledge as a process and not a product and when we broaden our definition thereof beyond the conventionally scientific, dignifying with that name whatever a given community takes to be true, the playing field gets leveled and all of the episode’s competing epistemologies attain visibility as the potential adjuncts of political power. In this spirit, several of our contributors place distinct modes of knowing into conversation under the sign of commensurability: Rivett through comparative readings of scripturally inflected Western science and folkloric Indigenous knowledge making, Hill through the irenic intellectual framework of eclecticism, and Glover through the diverse ethical and epistemological systems that belie the universalist pretensions of the law of nations.⁶

Second, alongside the glimpse of subaltern epistemologies that a colonizer text like Waterhouse’s provides, it also raises precisely those questions of credibility that were then being litigated by the Scientific Revolution he celebrated. Waterhouse was not an eyewitness to the Powhatan Uprising, much less to the gunpowder scene, and he hedges on his source, qualifying the anecdote with a rather shaky preface: “as Fame divulgeth (not without probable grounds) their King hath since caused . . . the Gunpowder . . . to bee sowne” (1622: 21). Attributed to no one in particular (“Fame” or rumor) and propped up parenthetically with an assertion of plausibility rather than positivity, the story better performs its ideological work (reassuring English readers shaken by the uprising) because it does not labor under an especially onerous burden of proof. And this raises the question of whether Waterhouse simply invented the episode. That possibility is strengthened by James Horn’s (2021) contention that Opechancanough would have been quite familiar with gunpowder before the English arrived in the Chesapeake from his prior contact with Spaniards—a testament to Ibero-Americans’ preeminence in the story of science and empire. And it is reinforced by the fact that remarkably similar claims were later made about the Powhatans in a text by Captain John Smith and about an entirely different Indigenous group in a work by the French Huguenot missionary and naturalist Charles de Rochefort. The former wrote in 1624 that during his famous 1607–8 captivity, the Powhatans “carefully preserved” a “bagge of gunpowder . . . till the next spring, to plant as they did their corne; because they would be acquainted with the nature of that seede” (Smith [1624] 2007: 320). The latter claimed that certain Indigenous “Caribbians were perswaded that Gun-powder was the Seed of some Herb” and “put it into the ground, out of a perswasion that it would bring forth somewhat, as well as other Seeds” (Rochefort 1666: 272). If the episode were fabricated or borrowed from an earlier source, Waterhouse’s text could be said to be engaged in an untrustworthy, even fictionalizing, mode that was held to be antithetical to objective scientific genres like the “true history” (McKeon 1987). This, too, has proved fertile ground for scholars engaged with the epistemological turn, who have probed the interweaving, even inextricability, of factual and fictional discursive techniques in early American texts: novels appropriated the scientific rhetoric of credible eyewitnessing to bolster the literary effect of realism, while scientific genres borrowed data from other texts without empirical verification (as in Takahata’s contribution), dressed invented evidence in the garb of eyewitness reportage (as in Glover’s), or otherwise relied on speculation (as in Greeson’s contribution), imaginative projection (as in Hill’s), or what Tita Chico (2018: 1) calls “literary knowledge.” These complexities begin to suggest why literary historians have been at the forefront of the study of New World knowledge making, a body of thought inseparable from its instantiation in writing and other legible media.

Finally, regardless of its historical facticity, Waterhouse’s gunpowder story signals how non-European modes of knowing consistently exceed the understanding of Western interpreters, past and present. We might speculate that Opechancanough arrived organically at an inductive, experimental approach to gunpowder akin to his invaders’ scientific method, but the true meaning of his act for him ultimately eludes certainty. Vernacular epistemologies invite deeper research and cautious conjecture—as with Polcha’s allusions to the Black Catholicism that vied with the faith’s hegemonic French iteration in colonial New Orleans or Greeson’s nods to the Algonquian informants Manteo and Wanchese’s own ideas about the natural resources Harriot promoted. Perhaps some crucial piece of ethnographic information about the Powhatans could help us make the case that Opechancanough’s gunpowder sowing was less an escalation of the New World arms race than a symbolic gesture of peace following his chastening of the English in 1622, a substitution of agriculture’s sustaining foodstuffs for the weapons of war or a spin on the Indigenous diplomatic ritual of burying the hatchet (a possibility that Angela Calcaterra [2021] has explored in another context). But the deed’s persistent mysteriousness might also demand respect for what we cannot know about other times, places, and cultures. Sometimes, as Takahata argues, not knowing—or not choosing between the kinds of interpretive possibilities I’ve amassed here—can be an act of respect for the colonized that undoes the unholy alliance between science and empire. As their shared coinage by the nineteenth-century philosopher James Frederick Ferrier suggests, the terms epistemology (the study of knowledge) and agnoiology (the study of ignorance) are two sides of the same coin.⁷

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Past and recent work on New World knowledge making has redefined each word in the phrase early American literature. The pull of earlier centuries has made obfuscating anachronisms more apparent. Exchange with specialists in other languages and cultures has invalidated the cultural geography shaped by the eventual fact of US independence. And a more capacious sense of form, genre, and medium has opened up new objects of study. Taken together, these developments prompt reflection on the field’s signature method: the close reading of primarily nonfictional texts informed by a historicist hermeneutics of suspicion. Also known as symptomatic reading, the hermeneutics of suspicion has been criticized as reductive (Best and Marcus 2009; Felski 2015): the rigorous excavation of the hidden meaning texts are presumed to harbor may risk overlooking what resides on their surface. Yet scholarship on New World knowledge production promises to nuance this debate by taking up texts and contexts where truth telling was of explicit importance and, indeed, where the very foundations of scientific objectivity were laid in the first place. Revisiting those developments’ ground zero, the Scientific Revolution’s global stage, invites fresh ways of thinking about what we do when we analyze texts. Because they are not just efforts at knowledge making in the present but ones focused in an iterative, metacritical sense on knowledge making in the past, the works of scholarship on display in the following pages suggest that the problem of epistemology in modernity is essentially a problem of reading, construed to include the interpretation of alphabetic and nonalphabetic writing, images, material culture, speech, sound, gesture, performance, the environment, and the supernatural.

Scholars identify the Americas as a key site of early modern knowledge making not in an exceptionalist sense but because the experience of novelty, alterity, and transoceanic distance brought issues of commensurability, credibility, and accessibility to the fore. A lack of firsthand access among those who did not live or travel abroad granted substantial cultural capital (and significant opportunities for bad faith) to eyewitnesses who did. Distance and unfamiliarity exacerbated issues of trust, necessitating new techniques of credible reportage and critical reading that remain central to the field that now studies them. In this sense, the empiricism under discussion in our contributing articles names something far more complex than the Whiggish “British empiricism” of yore. For Glover, distance occasions both uses and abuses of empiricism. For Greeson, present-tense observation fuels eager corporate speculation about the future. For Polcha, the lived experience of colonial architecture strives to choreograph social and ecological relations. For Hill, the imagination proves central to the scientific inquiry even of onsite eyewitnesses. For Rivett, inductive natural scientific categories remain powerfully informed by scriptural genealogies. And for Takahata, empiricism’s champions turn out not to be all that empiricist. Perhaps, then, the roots of symptomatic reading lie not just in Marxian and Freudian interpretive paradigms (Best and Marcus 2009: 4) but also in the epistemological crises provoked by the colonial systems that created the modern self of psychoanalysis and the web of capitalist exchange in which that self is perennially caught. And perhaps the system of ostensibly transparent meaning making that the hermeneutics of suspicion arose to interrogate can be traced back not only to the transcendent logos of the Platonic and Christian traditions (Best and Marcus 2009: 5) but also to the positivist promise of the Scientific Revolution.

Arriving at a crucial inflection point, as a second phase of the epistemological turn in early American literary studies comes into its own, this special issue seeks to stimulate discussion about what scholarship in this vein might accomplish in the future. Having jettisoned a host of limiting prior assumptions, early Americanists are recovering a pluralistic and political, relentlessly interdisciplinary, and profoundly spiritual modernity. Like the Powhatans who may have planted gunpowder in the hope that it would grow—and unlike the positivist scientists whose shifting “paradigms” Bauer contrasts with humanists’ accumulating “turns” in his afterword—these scholars are taking an open-ended approach to an eclectic archive that promises to bear fruit in the form of exciting findings and even more exciting questions.

This special issue was incubated during postdoctoral fellowships at two scholarly centers dedicated to fostering epistemologically oriented work, the American Philosophical Society and the University of Chicago’s Institute on the Formation of Knowledge. Its foundations were laid in a 2018 Modern Language Association roundtable on “Eyewitnessing and Early American Literature” and a 2019 Society of Early Americanists conference panel on “Early American Empiricisms.” And it was shaped by conversations with Chris Iannini, Kathleen Donegan, Ana Schwartz, and Scotti Parrish. I am deeply appreciative of those institutions, presenters, audiences, and colleagues. And I gratefully acknowledge the Fletcher Jones Foundation fellowship at the Huntington Library and the Hellman fellowship from UCLA that allowed me to see the special issue through to completion.

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