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)

Online access available to registered guests. Please contact us here for details.

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

Programme (all times GMT + 1)

Thursday, 28 November 

• 15:30
  Welcome
• 16:00      
  Rüdiger Zymner (Wuppertal): 
  Keynote address, "Poesia et scientiae. Didactic Poetry in the Early Modern Period
• 17:30—19:00     
  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"
  Enrico Piergiacomi (Haifa): 
  "The Master of Transparency. Fracastoro’s Naugerius and the Foundation of Medical Poetry"

Friday, 29 November

• 9:00      
  Vladimir Brljak (Durham): 
  Keynote address, "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): 
  "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-Grandizo (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"