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Foreword
“I have taken all knowledge to be my province”, wrote Francis Bacon in a private letter in 1592, a statement that has been interpreted in two very different ways. On the one hand, it has been seen as a claim by that archetypically Renaissance man to be familiar with everything that passed for knowledge in contemporary society. On the other, the author of Advancement of Learning (1605) has been taken to mean in his statement that his field of study was knowledge itself—both its nature and the intellectual and methodological instruments necessary for investigating it. Historically speaking, these two interpretations mark a major shift in perspective concerning our relationship to the world in which we live and, in particular, our capacity to understand and modify it. From Bacon’s time onward, it became increasingly difficult for any individual to claim to know, or even be interested in, everything. Knowledge increased exponentially, quantitatively, and—in certain respects at least—qualitatively. A major factor in this development, at one and the same time both cause and effect, was the coalescence and emergence of domain-specific disciplines—a process which slowly gathered momentum at first but then accelerated dizzyingly from the mid-18th century and which continues to do so today and which provides the wider historical context for Chia-Mei Jane Coughlan’s book.