My previous post about the problems of the historical novel has another dimension to it. In that post, I posed two questions, working with C.J. Sansom's popular Tudor detective novel, Dissolution: whether a good historical novel is harder to write in a period of poor general education, and whether the historical novel works less effectively when narrated in the first person. Both problems arise because the novel appears more didactic than fictional. Now whatever the answer to these questions, my point is that they were not raised out of my engagement with some great work of literature. Indeed, I suggested that the best historical literary fictions, such as John Fowles' French Lieutenant's Woman, actively bring such questions to the fore through devices such as metafiction, by which they reflect on the processes by which the story is being crafted. So, in a sense, my two simple questions hardly seem worth asking about this book, because the novel has pre-empted them and is interested in deeper, more complex issues, such as the degree to which we can ever transparently and accurately represent anything through language. It is perhaps only in less carefully constructed literature that basic questions come to the fore, at least for literary critics, because the problems with the fiction stand out so clearly.

And this brings to mind something I said to my students at the start of the academic year. We were looking at Robinson Crusoe, and in my initial questions I ascertained that the majority of them had not enjoyed it. Some of them were even bold enough to call it a "bad" novel. Ever the optimist, I tried to put a positive spin on things by saying that this was a pretty unique work on their course. Most of the novels, poems and plays they study over the three years are there because they have some intrinsic aesthetic merit, at least according to the lecturers who include them on syllabi. Robinson Crusoe, however, is there by virtue of its historical significance, as one of the earliest English novels. And so it is a unique book for them to study, because it is one of those rare works that has some quite obvious deficiencies in style and structure, even if it is contextually an important work of literature. In the tutorial, we were able quite easily to discuss issues of realism, because of how sharply this is breached when Crusoe swims naked to the shipwreck and returns with biscuits in his pockets. We also pinpointed that one primary objection to the novel is that its allegorical and didactic religious intentions bubble like froth on the surface of the plot, and so we almost automatically put up barriers against its moralising. The development of the novel over the three centuries since Crusoe can be read as the development of increasingly clever ways to conceal social and political issues beneath the text, in ways which are more effective because they sneak in by the back door of the book's potential readings. As with Dissolution, this problem of didacticism in Robinson Crusoecame out because of, rather than in spite of, the developmental weaknesses of Defoe's embryonic novel.

I wonder, therefore, whether literature courses are perhaps too much built around the canon of good literature. Should courses be bolder and also look at works of questionable literary quality? This of course feeds into broader debates about the role of literature departments: should literature departments exist to maintain taste and inculcate generations of students about what a good work of art looks like (a Harold Bloom kind of view), or should departments reflect the literary predilictions of culture as a whole, studying those books that happen to be popular even if not considered good fiction by trained literary critics? My own opinions would sway towards the latter, since my research looks at popular science fiction (arguably the most academically overlooked genre of significance), including film and computer games. Over the years, I have drifted away from being a pure literature student into a cultural studies researcher.

But regardless of my personal convictions and this broader debate, I am sure that even the conservative, Bloomian school ought to acknowledge that the teaching of literature loses something if it only ever focuses on the good, without providing a counter-image of the "bad" against which fine writing defines itself. Not only would such an "anti-canon" (as one might tentatively call it) help to guide questions of taste, it also might point to significant theoretical issues, such as those to which my attention was drawn in my previous post. The risk of only ever looking at "good" literature is that we focus intently on the intricate stylistic complexities that combine to make it excellent. We talk about Austen's free indirect discourse as a way of creating psychological intimacy, or George Eliot's omniscient narrator in Middlemarch, or John Fowles' historiographic argument in The French Lieutenant's Woman. And we overlook the very basic fact that a novel (and in a different way, a poem) tells a story, and that novels that have few stylistic innovations or have significant stylistic problems can nevertheless tell "good" stories. Just look at the longevity of the Crusoe myth in popular culture, or the fact that, in spite of my critical objections, I am absorbed in Dissolution's murder mystery, turning the pages as my light burns late into the night.

Because I am now freed from the shackles of reading for research, I have just started an historical thriller that has been receiving rave reviews: C.J. Sansom's Dissolution. However, because the disease of literary criticism has by now infected me deep into my bones, I cannot approach this novel in the light-hearted, entertaining way I am supposed to, and cannot help but think about questions of technique.

Dissolution has sparked off a few thoughts about the problems of historical novels in particular, and also of first person narration in general.

Issues in the former begin on the first page, and can be summarised by a single word: didacticism. This novel is set in the Tudor period, in the wake of the Henretian Reformation. But lest we miss the connection, within the first few paragraphs we are informed that our hero is working for Lord Cromwell; that he had "once believed with Erasmus that faith and charity would be enough to settle religious differences between men"; that he spots poles on London Bridge upon which stand the heads of those executed for treason; and that he is mourning the death of Queen Jane (Seymour). The historical details are packed in here, but the effect is like touring a museum recreation of a Tudor scene.

There is nothing natural in either the novel or such a museum, as every person has been placed there not for their own purposes, but to illustrate with waxy rigidity some dimension of the period. The blacksmith never simply happens to be working, but must present a "blacksmith working," hammering the anvil with the utmost concrentation; the shepherd is never simply shivering in a field wondering how long it will be before he gets home to his mutton stew, but is a "shepherd herding," crook in hand, posed as if looking too-strenuously for a lost sheep; a lady never empties a chamber pot whilst yelling at her kids, but is trapped forever in time as "woman emptying chamberpot." In an educational museum, of course, such caricatures serve a legitimate purpose. But in a novel seeking to recreate a thriving London scene, the mentions of the names of Cromwell, Erasmus, Seymour, Henry VIII all just seem to coincidental to be true to life. They have the quality of mannequins, lacking individual character and there simply for a purpose of the events which they illustrate. The historical novel must cling to the world's realism more than other genres, since history has actually happened, and the fiction inhabits that genuine - if now lost - world, rather than emerging from a timeless authorial imagination. Oddly, though, the more the historical novel strives for realistic detail the more it over-reaches its remit as a novel, a work of fiction.

If the opening of the novel is overloaded with pop-history, a different but related problem arises when the writer cannot assume his reader's general knowledge. Consider this exchange between the detective-hero, Shardlake, and his assistant, Mark, as they ride past a church:

All the windows of the church were filled with candles, a rich glow filtering through the stained glass. The bell tolled, on and on.
"The All Souls' service," Mark observed.
"Yes, the whole village will be in church praying for the relief of their dead in purgatory."

Now can we really imagine that the Mark who knows instinctively what date the bells are tolling on really needs to be told the significance of this particular service by Shardlake? Of course not. But then, the information is not really directed to him, even though conveyed in dialogue, but to the secular, modern reader. When even dialogue, the most vernacular of representative modes, is turned to the demands of history rather than simply inhabiting it, the whole artifice of the novel is exposed. The problem is that it is trying to perform two incompatible aims: to render a period realistically, whilst providing an entertaining and plausible work of fiction.

So this leads me to my first, general question: are good historical novels impossible to produce in a modern era when a reading public lacks a general grounding in social and religious history? As Andrew Motion observed recently, it is becoming increasingly difficult to teach English Literature because students do not know the Bible or classical mythology on which much of the canon is based. Even fifty years ago, one can imagine that the final sentence quoted above would not have needed to be written, because the author could expect a reader instinctively to know the meaning of All Soul's Day. The historical novel has been perhaps the most popular genre of recent times; one can bring immediately to mind Ellis Peters' Cadfael novels, Umberto Eco's The_Name_of_the_Rose, Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, Conn Iggulden's Emperor series, Bernard Cornwall's Sharp books, Allan Mallinson's Matthew Hervey series. Do these fictions suffer by being unable to stand as independent narratives in their own right, instead needing to convey history as information, rather than as the coincidental backdrop to the narrative, like the weather?

Not being an expert in this field, perhaps I am being unfair, which is why I present it as an open question. To look more specifically at this particular novel, though, another question springs to mind which is more specific, and can be illustrated by the following passage:

We made our way down Scarnsea's cobbled main street, where the top storeys of ancient houses overhung the road, keeping to one side to avoid the emptying of pisspots.

What is wrong here is the corollary to the didactic edge I have been complaining about. Again, we have the historical detailing. But that this is a problem may have something to do with this novel's narrative technique: first person narration. Keeping to one side of the street to avoid chamber pots is the sort of instinctive action that, in a character of its time, would have been entirely unconscious, and therefore not worth commenting upon. As with the dialogue quoted earlier, this moment exposes the didactic intention of historical fiction. But it is something we might object to less strongly if this information was relayed by an objective, omniscient, third-person narrator.

Such narrators act as discriminating eyes. They select what information we need to be told, and exclude other possibilities or unnecessary details. This is what John Fowles recognised in his postmodern reworking of the Victorian romance, The French Lieutenant's Woman. This historical novel is thick with metafiction, self-reflection on its own status and mechanisms as a novel (Linda Hutcheon would categorise this as a "historiographic metafiction.") In particular, Fowles presents himself as a character in the work, and likens himself to a puppeteer, pulling the strings of the love plot, presenting characters in certain beneficial or negative lights, and introducing modern paradigms of knowledge anachronistically into the Victorian period. Fowles seems to be saying that we cannot ever recapture history objectively, and any aspect or character of a period that is recollected is placed there, like props in a set, because the author requires it. History is made, not discovered, by the process of story.

Sansom's novel fails to realise this. By seeing events as if through the eyes of a character, it seems to be suggesting that such things could actually have happened, that these particular thoughts (avoiding chamberpots, acknowledging why the bells tolled) occured at the level of consciousness, and can therefore be written explicitly. Now I do not want to suggest the novel is not entertaining - I am certainly caught up by its tale of monastic murder. But it is compromised as a novel, a work of fiction, by clinging through the first person to the belief that a period can be seen now as it was seen then. I argue, however, that this is not the case, because between past and present the didactic intervenes, when to be successful any idea of a double-intention ought to be dissolved.

Jack Kerouac's On the Road is not a great formal work of literature. Its narrative line is repetitive, with little discernible development across the four books and separate road trips. Characters - including the narrator - are flat, popping up out of the background as we meet them, hitching a brief ride in its plot, before departing as specks in the rear view mirror of the book's incessant forward momentum.

But what it lacks in aesthetic sophistication, it makes up for with its wild-horse power, a fund of energy tapped from the collision between intense, young hearts - yearning, adventurous, sexually potent - and an American land and cityscape capable of satisfying their desires, but in a too-brief flare of passion.

Europeans are used to seeing America from a distance, down the telescopes of the space age, music, Disney, Sky News and, today, the internet. From this angle, America is perceived whole, with a glossy narrative of a unified republic of peoples. On the Road presents America from the other end, giving us unique individuals who seem full of character, but whose stories remain incoherent, hidden and untold behind the drive of the prose. It looks out onto America through a moving lens, which has the effect of distorting space and time, compressing and focusing America's landmass into a few miles of tarmac and a few pages of print which nevertheless contain multitudes:

"Whooee!" yelled Dean. "Here we go!" And he hunched over the wheel and gunned her; he was back in his element, everybody could see that. We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move And we moved!

The distortion of space and time is echoed in the print by the use of commas to splice together what should be separate sentences, as if even language cannot sit still on its own full stops. For all its aesthetic flaws and rough edges, then, there is undoubtedly a poetry of sorts here.In a passage like the following, it is easy to understand why the dust jacket of my edition (the 2000 Penguin Classics edited by Ann Charters) likens Kerouac to Walt Whitman:

There was the Pacific, a few more foothills away, blue and vast and with a great wall of white advancing from the legendary potato patch where Frisco fogs are born. Another hour and it would come streaming through the Golden Gate to shroud the romantic city in white, and a young man would hold his girl by the hand and climb slowly up a long white sidewalk with a bottle of Tokay in his pocket. That was Frisco; and beautiful women standing in white doorways, waiting for their men; and Coit Tower, and the Embarcadero, and Market Street, and the elevel teeming hills.

The movement here from local geography (the bay) into a spectra of the mind (the unknown young man), which then roams from the local (the place names) to the mythical (the eleven teeming hills) is not unlike the psychological transcendence of Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

With authorial connections like this, coupled with a style which is at once flawed and its great achievement, it is difficult to place On the Road in the Western or American canon. Perhaps Old Bull Lee is the character who might represent the uneasy status of the book as a whole. Lee experiments with boiling down bird seed to smoke as dope, sits with Shakespeare on his lap whilst reading Mayan codices, has tried narcoanalysis and discovered his seven different personalities, from an English Lord to a raving idiot who must be restrained by chains. Like the novel, Lee is a confused but bold experiment, trying to find which of many possible identities might be best placed to study America as it rushes past in a blur of history:

He had studied medicine in Vienna; had studied anthropology, read everything; and now he was settling down to his life's work, which was the study of things themselves in the streets of life and the night.

Wallace Stevens meets Don DeLillo, the plain sense of things hidden deep beneath the belly of a glossy American life and letters.

Any decent Graduate School training programme includes workshops to help a student along every step of the road to a doctorate. There are programmes on how to use Microsoft Word, workshops on time management, guides to dealing with a supervisor, advice on preparing for a viva and, finally, guidance on finding jobs when that doctorate is in hand. But pause and backtrack. Between these final stages there is a step missing, one you do not even think about when you are writing and researching, and which I encountered only on my return from the Christmas break.

Having submitted a few days before Santa geared up his reindeer, when I came back after the festivities were over, and sat down at my desk to catch up on the emails that had built up, I went to compose a reply and realised my signature was wrong. Previously, my signature line included my name followed by an unambiguous statement of my position: "PhD Research Student." I also included the address of my department, and a link to my research profile.

But what should my signature line say now? I am not really a PhD student any more, as I have not gone into continuation and have paid no fees, and I am not actively researching. But neither am I a post-doc, since I have no doctorate yet. Using the departmental address, too, seems a bit odd, since although I am teaching a considerable amount in my department, the bulk of my salary comes from a job at one of the university libraries. Then again, putting "Library Dogsbody" after my name would confuse my students. So I went for the minimal approach, just my plain old name and email address. Not even any of the letters I have accumulated: BA, MA, AHEA. As I have come to realise, the period after submitting but before viva-ing (is that a verb? it sounds like some Latin dance) has no name, which perhaps explains why it is overlooked on training programmes.

Since Christmas, I have been caught in a peculiar routine. Following the advice of friends who have graduated, I am not going to look at or work on my thesis until closer to my viva in Easter. Instead, I have spent the last month or so getting on with my teaching preparation, reading Paradise Lost and Midnight's Children, and mugging up on Freud and deconstruction. I have also had a lot of marking to do. However, my days are by not bursting at the seams of time as they were in the run up to submission last term.

I do have a few research thoughts bubbling in the back of my mind - something on mobile phone fictions, something on complexity, a paper on Frederic Jameson and computer games - but to be honest I simply cannot be bothered to get going on any one of these; when I do, no doubt I'll post thoughts in progress on this blog.

I think I was so burnt out before Christmas that I cannot bear the thought of starting from scratch on a new project. Indeed, I am not sure I can even remember how to begin in principle, because it is so long since I actually researched anything original, took down notes, and wrote down ideas. Although I have never worked harder than the previous six months, that period of finishing my thesis consisted mostly of re-writing and editing, with very little original thought, and certainly no writing 1000 words on a page that had been blank at the start of the day. This was the Polyfiller phase of PhD, when I filled in the gaps and smoothed the cracks of my existing writing and research. Those days three long years ago when I used to sit reading all morning, go for a walk after lunch, and dash out some brilliant (or so they seemed at the time) paragraphs on my computer are distant memories.

This phase, then, can best be described as a limbo. I am not in the heavenly phase of discovering new and interesting ideas, but neither am I experiencing the hell of getting these ideas coherently written during excessively busy days. I am something more than a PhD student, for in the last six months I finally became confident as a researcher, but I am not yet wearing the badge of "Dr" that makes my skills official. And, of course, there is the distinct possibility that I will not be awarded the PhD straight away, but will have to do substantial corrections.

I am still kicking around my department, nattering easily with staff and other postgraduates as I photocopy teaching handouts, but I am conscious that my eyes should really be set on other jobs, in a different university. I am financially comfortable, what with my library and teaching jobs and Mrs. Ishmael's salary also, and could happily drift along like this for the next few years; however, I know that this is not a long-term, secure career.

Perhaps I would feel happier if I at least had a label to attach to this short phase of my life. Pre-post-doc is a bit clumsy. Post-Phd-student is a bit contradictory. Any better ideas?

In the credit crunch era, the financial plans of everyone - from large corporations to public amenities to individuals - have to be reassessed. But there seems to have been relatively little in the press about how the recession will impact upon students or recent graduates, other than the obvious issue that jobs will be hard to come by when students leave university. Partly, perhaps, this is due to the fact that the recent Research Assessment Exercise has captured the attention of universities wondering how much they will receive for research, and so universities and press have been less focused on the other side of the research-teaching coin.

So, with the substantial disclaimer that I am by no means an expert on this subject, here are some of my own thoughts on how the recession might affect higher education. Most of these points are particular for England or the United Kingdom, but may apply elsewhere also.

• The first, and most empirically certain thing to note, is that student loans have their interest rates for each year tied to the Retail Price Index as it stands in March. Over recent years, this has hovered around 3 percent. However, as of December 2008, this fell below 1 percent, with the downward trend set to continue. It is likely that come March, interest rates on student loans will be minimal, allowing those students who are in well-paid jobs to repay their loans at a faster rate. However, if RPI falls below zero, so that we have deflation in March, does this mean that the Student Loans Company will start actually paying students loans off? The terms and conditions of the loans state only that "the Government has to keep the value of what is owed in line with the general rate of inflation. They do this by working out the rate of inflation each year as defined by the Retail Prices Index (RPI) and fixing the interest charged to that rate...The new interest rate is based on the Retail Price Index for the previous March." There is no indication of what happens when the RPI falls below zero - something probably not imagined in the heady days of the economic boom when loans were introduced - and there are probably some worried faces running around the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills trying to find a loophole to ensure students repay loans at some positive rate of interest.


• In a recession, one might expect students to hold off from incurring large debts, and favour finding immediate jobs ahead of further study. However, the reverse appears to be the case. With lower-skilled jobs on the decline in a recession (jobs in manufacturing or retail, for example), it is best for students leaving school to head to university in the hopes that economic prospects will have improved in three years, and knowing that at least the student loans offer a guaranteed (if minimal!) level of financial support. The Times Higher Education reports today that the government's restriction on university numbers is limiting the number of places available for increasing numbers of applicants.


• The flip side to this is fewer foreign students will apply to universities abroad. The Higher Education Policy Institute recently warned that if China were to fall into recession, the effect on this vital funding stream would be "cataclysmic." Though the drying up of foreign students will affect universities globally, Britain may oddly see the recession work in its favour to offset the losses, because of the plummet in the value of the pound. However, HEPI suggested that this might mean students opt for one year courses and choose to pay up front, rather than facing the the full three years at uncertain exchange rates.


• More difficult to predict is the effect the recession will have on any plans to lift the cap on top-up fees (set at £3000 plus inflation), and move to a system of full fees. The review on lifting the tution fee cap was due in 2009, but this has now been put off until 2010, after a likely general election. Universities would like the bar to be set at between £6000 to £7000. MP Ian Gibson, former chair of the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee, has argued against lifting the cap, saying that this would be incompatible with the Prime Minister's plan to ride out the recession by investing in green science research and skills. It would also surely be contradictory for the government to condemn excessive borrowing whilst allowing a new generation of students to start life owing £20 000 for tuition, plus any additional loans they need to support themselves. Furthermore, assuming the system stays the same with the government paying for students up-front, with students then repaying the loans once in work, the government would be required to put a large amount of capital into higher education, without guarantees that it would be paid back quickly, if the economy continues to run slowly. The stalling of tuition fee rises by the recession is, however, only a short term effect; longer term it is quite clear that UK higher education is moving towards the privatised, full-fee model of the United States, and will eventually do so under a Labour or Conservative government.

So there we have it. The layman's thoughts on how the credit crunch will affect current and future students. Clearly, the sector - like all others - faces a rocky and uncertain time, though if the government does see investment in research and technology as the light at the end of the tunnel of recession, universities might ultimately come out well on the research side of things. The people one has to be most worried about are new graduates. Vacancies for graduates have dropped 17 percent in the six months since summer 2008, particularly (and not surprisingly) in the financial sector. As if it were not already competitive as a result of the expansion of higher education, new graduates can expect to struggle for survival in the harshest economic environment in two decades.


Update 13th February 2008

Following the above post, The Guardian Education has just reported a big rise in undergraduate applications. Applications are up 7.8%, with

signs that the recession is affecting people's choice of degree, breeding a new generation of economists and mathematicians. The number of applications for economics degrees increased by 15.7% to a total of 44,750. Applications for maths rose 10.4% and for politics 16.7%.

There has also been an increase in public sector training degrees, hardly surprising since the public sector offers greater job security and, given the present need for investment from the public purse, probably increasing numbers of jobs also:

Applications for nursing rose by 16.7%, education degrees by 10.7% and teacher training by 3.7%. It is thought that people are opting for "safer" jobs outside business and commerce.

Not surprisingly:

There was a 7.6% decline in applications for building degrees as the construction industry slows, though there were modest rises in business degree applicants.

The annual post-Christmas guilt about our excessive consumption has, as usual, been accompanied by advertisements promising miraculous diet plans and detox solutions. But this period been made more interesting this year because the scientists (spoilsports that they are) have been fighting back. The Sense About Science organisation recently launched a Detox Dossier exposing the fraudulent claims of Detox quacks. Appearing on the Today programme to discuss detox plans, Ben Goldacre of Bad Science launched a highly effective condemnation of the claims of one organisation, Detoxinabox. He showed that they could not even spell that nasty chemical "cadminum" (i.e. cadmium) correctly, and that the managing director did not even know the contents of the spurious claims made on her own website when she responded to these allegations in interview.

This miniature tussle was symptomatic of a far wider battle going on between science and alternative therapies. At one level, this battle is purely commercial. There is a quick buck to be made by selling detox products to a public desperate for some easy way to fix their Christmas excesses. It does not matter that scientists have shown the ludicrous evidence base behind their clever sounding jargon, since by the time the products are exposed, they will have sold in sufficient quantities and can hibernate from view until the next festive period. At another level, though, detox products are part of a broader milieu in which evidence-based medicine is (at best) not well-understood, and (at worst) perceived to be no better way of dealing with pathological problems than any other.

Now as a literary academic I am not well-placed to deconstruct the claims made for detox or other quack products. However, what I can do is to offer some relief to the pain of those scientists who are fed up by the way in whichthey must go to great lengths to get a new drug to market (double-blind clinical trials etc.), whilst the public is prepared to swallow made-up advertising hokum of detox products. How can I help the suffering scientists? Well, by at least pointing out that such a struggle between authentic practitioners and pseudo-scientists has a long heritage.

Let us go back to the sixteenth century, and the French royal court. Here we find the physician, Ambroise Paré, chief surgeon to Henry II, Francis II, Charles IX and Henry III, and arguably the most prominent and well-known medical man of his era (a sort of Renaissance Robert Winston). Paré published on medical instruments, military injuries, childbirth and physiognomy. However, his most enduring and quirky work is On Monsters and Marvels, dating from around 1573. Here, Paré offers a compilation of his own and second-hand accounts of birth defects, sea and land monsters, and grotesque injuries.

Now Paré is by no means a modern clinician. Although his use of detailed anatomical drawings is forward-looking, for the most part he relies on the two age-old authorities - Aristotle and Hippocrates - to explain how foetuses are created and may develop abnormally, and how abherrations come about. However, what is interesting about Paré is that he nevertheless feels his science is grounded on something more than superstitious belief. He invokes Augustine to argue that nothing in God's universe is intrinsically monstrous or the work of demons, it is just that we have not looked closely enough and understood what those monsters are intended by God to signify. When reading Paré, it is important to understand that - in his own time - the best scientific practices as then defined were not incompatible with believing that ultimately science (or, if you prefer, "science") would show the brilliance of God's creation.

In the modern period, in an age of wars between science and religion, we tend to place people in the camps of either empiricism, or of supersitition. If one believes in God, for example, why does one not believe in ghosts, angels, or demons? There seems to be no logical explanation for why some one who believes in God should think ghosts cannot possibly exist. Conversely, if one pursues the empirical method, it should be quite clear that miracles breach the laws of science. Anyone who holds religious and scientific values concurrently is either self-deluded or forced to fudge two fundamentally contradictory positions, as indicated most prominently in the Intelligent Design movement which reconciles God with evolution.

As a child of the sixteenth century, however, Paré thinks differently. It is taken for granted that God exists, but that is not to say that every possible superstitious belief should be entertained, regardless of evidence to the contrary. The most prominent evidence of this in On Monsters is that Paré argues that demons or the Devil do not actually possess real power to create monsters. If they did, this would imply that God was not omnipotent (all-powerful). Rather, Paré argues that demons operate by illusion. They only seem to create monsters or hideous forms by implanting false ideas in the minds of the witnesses; they can never actually make monsters, contrary to God's perfect wishes.

In the history of science, it is ironic that Paré stakes a claim for science out of this religious conviction. Rather than religion and science being antithetical, as they seem to be today, religion lends the scientist his authority to explain the world better than a different, untrained person. Paré puts himself up as the best, most scientifically rigorous of medical practitioners, so far as "science" was construed at the time. He argues against quack practitioners, who are in league with the devil:

Now just exactly as the Devil, chief and sworn enemy of man, often (yet through God's permission) afflicts us with great and diverse maladies, so do sorcerers, tricksters, and wicked men - through ruses and diabolical tricks - torture and abuse countless men; some invoke and adjure heaven knows what spirits, through whispers, exorcisms, imprecations, enchantments, and bewitchments; others tie around the neck - or else carry on them in some other way - certain writings, certain characters, certain rings, certain pictures, and other such claptrap; others use certain harmonious chants and dances. Sometimes they use certain potions, or, rather, poisons, suffimigations, perfumes, charms, and enchantments. Some are found who, having contrived the image and likeness of some absent party, pierce it with certain instruments, and boast of afflicting - with any such illness as pleases them - the one whose likeness they are piercing, even though he may be far away from them; and they say that this is done by virtue of the stars and of certain words that they hum while piercing such an image or likeness made of wax. There are, in addition, an infinity of such villainies which have been invented by these rascals to afflict and torment men, but it would weary me to say any more about it.

Irreligiousity (in the form of doing the Devil's work) and quackery are one and the same thing. Paré continues in defence of his profession:

I would never have been finished if I'd wanted to amuse myself by stringing together thousands upon thousands of [examples of] such superstitious gibberish and I would not have gone on about it so long, except in order to give warning to a lot [of persons], who are mistaken about it, not to believe in it any longer, and to beg them to reject all such foolishness, and to stop at what is assured, and [this] by so many skillful and worthy gentlemen [who are] confirmed and certified in Medicine; which doing, an infinite good will be brought about for the public; all the more because next to the honour of God, there is nothing that should be more precious to man than his health.

Any medical scientist reading this should feel a fellow hand reaching across the centuries in sympathy at the pressure they were placed under by fraudulent peddlers of quick pannaceas. True, Paré's own scientific discoveries and methods have been superseded today; but one can well-imagine that, had he been born four-hundred years later, Paré would have been happily stalking the corridors of the École Polytechnique. On the other hand, many modern scientists would like to pretend that the Enlightenment world has seen science and religion kept totally apart. However, Paré shows that the roots of the scientific revolution run earlier than the seventeenth century and the foundation of the Royal Society, and that the heritage of scientific authority is invested within a religious framework, not apart from it. Science emerged not against, but out of, religiously focused enquiries into the nature of the world, in this case Paré's desire to show that monsters are not intrinsically nasty but part of God's fecundly wondrous creation.

Indeed, the ultimate detox solution of all time has to have been the Catholic indulgences which promised absolution for all your sins (moral, as well as dietary). As part of this commercial conspiracy, Catholic priests might travel from town to town performing exorcisms, expunging the devil from a daemoniac, whose tortured body and troubled mind offered onlookers a foretaste of the purgatory to come - unless, of course, they were to buy an indulgence out of it.

Ambroise Paré, however, rebels against quackery like this, by denying that the Devil actually does physical work. It was, in part, only once demons were understood as illusions that the world became open to empirical testing. After all, if the Devil was at large in the world, how could one know that the world being tested was not the result of some diabolical hoax?