The Poetics of Early Modern Scientific Poetry

Inaugural conference of the international AHRC/DFG research consortium,
Scientific Poetry and Poetics in Britain and Germany, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

(University of York; Anglia Ruskin University; University of Marburg; University of Bayreuth)

Confirmed plenary speakers:
Vladimir Brljak (Durham)
Rüdiger Zymner (Wuppertal)

This conference aims to explore the ways in which scientific poetry was theorised immediately before, during, and after the ‘scientific revolution’, seeking a better understanding of the specific nature of knowledge that scientific poetry was expected to communicate and produce. For early modern prose, the ‘poetics of science’ have been extensively explored in recent years, but the specificity of verse – central to Renaissance, Augustan, and Enlightenment poetics – remains under-examined. We invite papers discussing the poetics of early modern vernacular and neo-Latin scientific poetry in international perspective.

The parallel development, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of modern science and literary criticism, entailed frequent cross-references between the two domains. Early modern writers deemed poetry the natural medium for representing natural knowledge, and at the same time, methods and insights from the new science reflected on the practice and perceived order of literature. The negotiation between the two domains was conducted, on the one hand, in poetological discourse, such as dedicated works on rhetoric and poetics, as well as in prefaces, dedications, and commentaries to individual works of poetry as well as anthologies. On the other hand, natural philosophers – usually with sound humanist training – self-consciously used or referenced poetry as an aid for the dissemination of knowledge, or indeed to argue for a fundamental epistemological difference between the two domains.

To understand better the specific nature of knowledge that scientific poetry was expected to communicate and produce in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, attention must be paid to how it was theorised. Given that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century critics set great store by the appropriateness of literary forms for specific subjects, insight from work on prose writings (concerning concepts such as perspective, evidence and probability, and the epistemology of fiction) can fruitfully be compared to the poetics of scientific poetry. This can correct an observer’s bias by which twentieth- and twenty-first century research has privileged precursors of the novel over poetry, a form arguably more or at least equally popular for much of the period in question. Scientific poetry promises to be more fruitfully studied than prose fiction with respect to key concerns of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century aesthetics and poetics, such as the imitation of classical models; the affordances of metre and rhyme; and the sublime.

The preliminary programme is as follows:

Thursday, 28 November

• 16:00      
  Keynote address, Rüdiger Zymner (Wuppertal): 
  "Poesia et scientiae. Didactic Poetry in the Early Modern Period
• 17:30—19:00     
  Enrico Piergiacomi (Haifa): 
  "The Master of Transparency. Fracastoro’s Naugerius and the Foundation of Medical Poetry"
  Ramune Markevičiūtė (FU Berlin): 
  "From Epic Tumult to a Quiet Language of Things.The Scientific Revolution and the Poetics of Latin Didactic Poetry"
  Felix Sprang (Siegen): 
  "‘Send me thy grace to make explanacion / Of Chaos’: The Poetics of Plain Style"

Friday, 29 November

• 9:00      
  Keynote address, Vladimir Brljak (Durham): 
  "New Science and New Criticism: Poetics among the Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century England"
• 10:30—12:00
  Irina Tautschnig (York): 
  "‘La philosophie d’aujourd’hui s’humanise’: The Poetics and Reception of Carlo Noceti’s Iris and Aurora borealis"
  Claudia Schindler (Hamburg): 
  "Neo-Latin Didactic Poetry between Poetry and Science: Giuseppe Mazzolari’s Electricorum libri (1767)"
  Reto Rössler (Flensburg): 
  "(Re-)Foundations of Didactic Poetry between Anthropology, Empirical Psychology and Aesthetics: Christoph Joseph Sucro and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing Responding to Pope"
• 13:00—14:30
  Stefano Gulizia (Milan): 
  "Scientific Poetry, Prophecy, and Naturwissenschaft from Leiden to Hamburg"
  Beth Dubow (Oxford): 
  "Scientific Poetry and the Early Modern Acrostic"
  Kathryn Murphy (Oxford): 
  "Enjambment at the End of the World"
• 15:00—16:30
  Ana Fernandez-Grandizio (Cambridge): 
  "The Poetics of Anatomical Verse in Phineas Fletcher’s The Purple Island"
  Roslyn Irving (Mainz): 
  "Prospect: Visualisation, Triangulation, and the Matter of Perspective"
  Lukas Etter (Siegen):
  "Hounds Chasing Rhymes: On a 1730 Introduction to Writing Enigmas and Mathematical Problems in Verse"
• 17:00—18:00
  Jean Eynard (Cambridge): 
  "‘Communities of Senses’: Natural Philosophy and the Limits of Synaesthesia in Cavendish and Butler"
  Rana Banna (UC London): 
  "‘Harmonious numbers’: A Seventeenth-Century Scientific Poetics" 

Saturday, 30 November

• 9:00—10:30
  Esther Bancroft (Glasgow): 
  "The Early Modern Poetic Vacuum"
  Kevin Killeen (York): 
  "The Outrageous Inner Lives of Plants: Tact and Abortion in Abraham Cowley’s Herb Garden"
  Christian Meierhofer (Bonn): 
  "The Poetic Potentials of Alchemy. German-speaking Baroque Mysticism and Its ‘Scientific’ Poetry"
• 11:00—12:30
  Imogen Choi (Oxford): 
  "‘No secret of nature would surprise me now’: The Poetics of Marine and Space Exploration in Miguel de Silveira’s El Macabeo"
  Charlotte Newcombe (York): 
  "Personification or Panpsychism? The Empedoclean Roots of Anne Bradstreet’s ‘The Foure Elements’ (1650)"
  Shankar Raman (MIT): 
  "‘A just and regular catastrophe’: Movement in Samson Agonistes"