Swift, Sterne, and the Skeptical Tradition

Abstract In a recent essay Donald Wehrs suggests that the tradition of fideistic skepticism offers a meaningful context for Laurence Sterne’s narrative and thematic concerns. In so doing he highlights the most significant, and hitherto overlooked, legacy of the Renaissance humanists with whom Sterne’s name is so frequently linked. It has long been a commonplace to see Tristram Shandy in the tradition of learned wit, but the late flowering of the tradition in Sterne’s fiction has never been adequately explained. Similarly, the epithet “skeptic” occurs regularly in discussions of Sterne, from John Traugott’s influential Tristram Shandy’s World in the 1950s to Jonathan Lamb’s recent Sterne’s Fiction and the Double Principle. Until Donald Wehrs’s article, however, skeptic had been used in its modern sense, denoting at worst universal doubt, or at best the kind of philosophical—and, more or less, secular—skepticism associated with Locke and Hume.