God-Language and Scepticism in Early Modern England
An Exploratory Study Using Corpus Linguistics Analysis as a Form of Distant Reading
This essay incorporates new trends of corpus linguistics research within an investigation of sceptical thought, particularly in the period of roughly 1580 to 1620. The analysis uses several standard texts, such as the Shakespeare First Folio (1623), the Florio translation of Montaigne (1613 ed.), the collected plays of Marlowe, Bacon’s Advancement of Learning (1605), etc., juxtaposed against larger reference corpora, such as a fully-keyed collection of several thousand English books printed between 1580 and 1620. Such juxtapositions enable contrastive analysis using various techniques of collocation, proximity, and syntactic pattern examination.