A Macroscope of English Print Culture, 1530-1700, Applied to the Coevolution of Ideas on Religion, Science, and Institutions

Abstract

We combine unsupervised machine-learning and econometric methods to study England's print culture in the pivotal 16th and 17th centuries. Machine-learning synthesizes the content of 57,863 texts comprising 83 million words into 110 topics. Topics include the expected, such as Natural Philosophy, and the unexpected, such as Baconian Theology. Timelines suggest that religious and political discourse gradually became more scholarly and economic topics more prominent. The epistemology associated with Bacon was present in theological debates already before Bacon's epistemological contributions. VAR estimates provide insight into the coevolution of ideas on religion, science, and institutions. Innovations in religious ideas induced strong responses in the other two domains, especially at times when Puritanism was prominent in religious discourse. Neither science nor institutional thought evidence secularization. The Glorious Revolution and the Civil War did not spur debates on institutions nor did the founding of the Royal Society markedly elevate attention to science.

Keywords: cultural history, England, machine-learning, text-as-data, coevolution, VAR

JEL Classification: C8, Z1, N0, P1, C3