Error is a neglected epistemological category in the history of science. This neglect has been driven by the commonsense idea that its elimination is a general good, which often renders it invisible or at least not worth noticing. At the end of the sixteenth century across Europe, medicine increasingly focused on “popular errors,” a genre where learned doctors addressed potential patients to disperse false belief about treatments. By the mid seventeenth century, investigations into popular error informed the working methodology of natural philosophers, rather than just physicians. In 1646, Thomas Browne published Pseudodoxia Epidemica, a large volume on popular error. Despite Browne’s formal training as a physician, this work examined only a few medical errors and instead aspired to be an encyclopedia of error. Pseudodoxia Epidemica was highly popular, running to six editions, and was known by the Fellows of the Royal Society. Influenced by Browne, alongside Bacon’s theory of the idols, natural philosophic practice in the late sixteenth and seventeenth century developed a focus on error that revised traditional attention to the discovery of knowledge. Fellows such as Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke proposed new ways to secure truth under the far-reaching influence of Bacon’s refutations of “natural human reason” distorted by false idols, of syllogistic logic, and of “theories,” his label for traditional philosophical systems that bias thought toward falsity. In three parts, this article traces the progression in early modern scientific approaches to handling error, and especially medical error – from physicians’ efforts to identify and eradicate it through collaborative effort, to the striking tension in Browne’s work between seeking to eliminate error while also showing a marked tolerance for it, to the Royal Society’s Baconian objective of instrumentalizing error to find truth. Error emerges as its own epistemic category that serves as a driving force toward knowledge production.

This article is a study of early literary theory and practice in Renaissance England, which focuses specifically on Shakespeare's language use. The end of the sixteenth century in England experienced a linguistic revolution as Latin was gradually replaced by vernacular English. Renaissance rhetoricians such as George Puttenham and Thomas Wilson patriotically argued that English was capable of employing figures of speech to express complex ideas. Yet in this period the vernacular was in a process of formation, demonstrated by Richard Mulcaster's Elementarie (1582). He argued for the expansion of the lexicon according to "enfranchisement": the welcoming and naturalizing of foreign words from Latin, Greek, Spanish, French and Italian into English (1582: 172).1 The Elementarie reveals how language was being shaped in a period of massive linguistic change. This is especially visible in the dynamic creativity of Shakespeare's linguisticallyinventive drama, made possible by the transition from Latin to a protean vernacular. He staged the difference within English itself and its mixing with foreign languages. This is particularly prevalent in Henry V (1599) with the representation of French and regional dialects, where linguistic exchange and semantic negotiation bring linguistic difference to the fore and the lexical parts become all the more plastic. This article seeks to examine what happens when English is set alongside foreign tongues: why they are used, how they are represented, and how they interact. It will argue that this attention to foreign language demonstrates English inviting rather than excluding strange tongues for the health of the linguistic body and the enhancement of expression.

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