Introduction: Troubled Truths

As a period characterised by a veritable host of socio-cultural changes, the seventeenth century not only emerged as a fertile breeding ground for novel kinds of literature but also as an arena where the concepts of fact and fiction were both negotiated and established. Encompassing interrelated discourses such as the fledgling natural sciences, law, religion—along with its alter ego, the supernatural—and, of course, literature, the search for an intersubjective truth occupied thinkers, writers and last but not least readers trying to make sense of the world they were part of. In addition to outlining the epistemological shifts shaping the long eighteenth century, this introductory chapter furthermore introduces the pivotal primary text this study is organised around: the Athenian mercury (1691–97), a periodical founded and helmed by bookseller John Dunton, representing one of the many literary innovations of this period. Engaging in an exemplary fashion with the instability of contemporary truth discourses, Dunton invented a fictional(ised) editorial body modelled on the Royal Society, the Athenian Society, in order to give weight to the periodical's statements, to stake its claim to truth.