"New Experiments in Vice:" Places of Experiment and Disorder in the Stuart Restoration (1660-1688)

Abstract

Some of the most canonical work on spaces of experiment in the Stuart Restoration (1660-1688), and indeed on the “place of experiment” more generally, has been largely concerned with settings insulating experiments from ambient vices, and forging authoritative connections with powerful virtues. This thesis departs from sites amenable to such constructivist models of space and its functions, instead privileging settings that did not work in concert with efforts to convince of the worth of experiment. It presents three spaces as important not just to experimental activity, but doubts about its utility during the Restoration: the tavern, the coffeehouse, and the park. It shows how, after the return of Stuart dynasty in 1660, each of these three sites functioned to bring experiment into contact with conduct and sociabilities germane to worries about the fragility of the very order the Restoration itself was supposed to produce. The ability of these settings to house symptoms of decline made them places of vice, while experiments emerging from their midst were vulnerable to representations emphasising their connection to disorder – portrayals insisting not on the use of experiment, but its danger, to the post-interregnum polity.