This project explores a mass of largely-unknown scientific poetry – and a corresponding poetics of science – that reveals a vibrant facet of Renaissance, Restoration, and Enlightenment culture: the production not only of ideas, but of new, technical vocabularies and fast-paced neologizing, all forged in the particular demands of poetic form. Poetry, the era believed, did not function as mere ornament, but to reveal deep structures in the created world. This potential was theorized by the period’s emerging literary criticism, a practice that developed in demonstrable parallel with modern ‘science’.
The project will unearth and analyze a body of work by women, much of it still in manuscript, that deploys its theo-scientific ideas to dazzling effect, as well as a mass of Neo-Latin verse on topics ranging from blood transfusion to flight theory. It will also show the diffusion of this phenomenal body of scientific literature and its agile poetics, whose influence can be seen in a set of networks operating across Northern Europe, in Latin and German as well as English, thereby tracing how a long history of didactic scientific verse morphs and mutates with dramatic effects in the late 17th and early 18th century.
This research addresses lacunae in both English and German scholarship. Much recent work has addressed the poetics of early modern science, but it has focused almost exclusively on prose writing, often of a later period, by male writers, in the vernaculars. The discipline is only beginning to explore the 17th and 18th centuries’ specific affordances of poetic form for communicating natural philosophical knowledge, and indeed the shared imaginative processes that were thought to inform both domains. One consequence of this blind spot has been the neglect of a significant English-German poeto-scientific transfer in the early European Enlightenment.
The project's reformulation of the era’s poetic ideas - its cosmopoetics, its theopoetics and its physico-theology - bears on how we understand emergent aesthetics in this most tumultuous period for the vernaculars of both England and Germany. It will also reveal a good deal about the compositional and referential density of both scientific knowledge and poetic forms, writing that came to be valued precisely because of its discursive volatility and its kaleidoscopic capacity. The project opens up Anglo-German perspectives on the European res publica litteraria that have not been studied, and via its exploration of respective textual corpora and archival finds, the cooperation promises to reveal connections and otherwise hidden parallels and differences in formal traditions and their historical trajectories.
The various strands of the project will be centred at the four participating universities
The strand of the project centred at Anglia Ruskin University focuses on the substantial body of lesser-known, often unpublished poetic work by early modern women, much of it composed in and for manuscript, which engages knowingly and creatively with natural philosophical ideas. Early modern women were exploring scientific topics in depth across a range of literary forms, in devotional, fantastical, political, autobiographical and elegiac writings as well as in predominantly natural philosophical texts. A major contribution of this strand is its mission to highlight natural philosophical knowledge and vocabularies in texts that are not primarily scientific in genre or intent. Examples include the presence of atomic physics in devotional lyric; explorations of botany and astronomy in country house poems and hexameral narratives; and reflections on anatomy in political verse. By drawing attention to these occurrences and patterns formed, we will rethink the contexts and philosophical knowledge base of early modern women’s writing, as well as the history of the relations between natural philosophy and poetics more broadly.
The Bayreuth workstream explores how scientific poetry was debated in the – often normative – theoretical and critical writings of the period. It seeks a better understanding of the specific nature of knowledge that scientific poetry was expected to communicate and produce, and the work of poetic form in the process. Given that great credit was placed by 17th- and 18th-century critics on the appropriateness of literary forms for specific subjects, insight from recent scholarship on prose writings (concerning concepts such as perspective, evidence, and probability, and the epistemology of fiction) will be correlated to the poetics of scientific poetry. The textual corpus for this workstream comprises dedicated print treatises on rhetoric and poetics (from Gascoigne, Puttenham, and Sidney to Dennis, Pope, Hutcheson, and Akenside), paratextual matter in poetry anthologies, translations, commentaries (e.g., of/on Lucretius, Manilius, Ovid, and Virgil), as well as critical contributions to periodicals (Addison, Steele, Pope, but also 17th-century precursors like Dunton’s Athenian Mercury), and reflections in the natural philosophical writings of Boyle, Charleton, Henry More, and others.
The Marburg workstream examines the poeto-scientific transfer between England and Germany in the first half of the eighteenth century, with a focus on didactic poems (Lehrgedicht) as mediators between science and poetry. Taking Barthold Hinrich Brockes’ lengthy collection Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott (1721–1748) as a prominent case study for German physico-theology, the project explores the hitherto neglected role of scientific poetry within the German early Enlightenment. A focus on the writings of Brockes - co-founder of the Patriotic Association, founder of the Spectator-oriented weekly Der Patriot and translator of James Thomson, Edward Young, Samuel Richardson and Alexander Pope - promises to give fruitful insights into the establishment of new media formats, namely poeto-scientific journals as part of a newly emerging literary sphere. Both in terms of texts and media formats, the analysis of Brockes’ Irdisches Vergnügen will show the compositional and referential density between scientific knowledge and poetic forms that characterises early German as well as English Enlightenment scientific poetry.
The strand of the project centred at York focuses on the range of scientific-poetic idea with attention to both nascent and established scientific fields (e.g. earthquake theory and mining, celestial theory and life sciences, atomical and chemical sciences), to work whose disciplinary sprawl goes beyond what would later be understood as science (for example, the ontology of spirits, the alchemy of resurrection, and the mechanics of the six-day creation). Across these investigative categories, we will explore and distinguish the utile in scientific poetry, where it is didactic, specific and tethered to scientific fact, and the imaginative, where its purpose is speculative and generative. Work on the anthology – of English, German and Latin verse - will be centred in this workstream. It aims to show that when, in the 17th century, writers began to incorporate scientific, theological and philosophical debates into their poetry, they did so not to imitate their prose equivalents, but rather to escape the limitations of prose. Poetry came to be valued precisely because of its discursive volatility, its kaleidoscopic capacity.
Editorial Board
Peter Burschel (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen)
Tita Chico (University of Maryland)
Danielle Clarke (University College Dublin)
Elisabeth Décultot (University of Halle)
Stefano Gulizia (University of Milan)
Yasmin Haskell (University of Western Australia)
Jessie Hock (Vanderbilt University)
Sarah Hutton (University of York)
Steffen Martus (Humboldt University of Berlin)
Martin Mulsow (University of Gotha)
Richard Nate (Katholischen Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt)
Jonathan Sawday (Saint Louis University)