Description
Programme
Women’s Scientific Literatures: The Poetry and Poetics of Early Modern Natural Philosophy
Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, 26-27 June 2025
Thursday 26 June
11.00 – 11.30: Welcome
11.30 – 12.45: Keynote – Danielle Clarke (University College Dublin), "'They that to number all thy vertus seeke/Had need invent sum new arethmiticke': numbers, mathematics and thought in early modern women's poetry"
12.45 – 13.30: Lunch
13.30 – 15.00: Panel 1 – Alchemy and elements
Sajed Chowdhury (Utrecht University): Chymical Poetics and the Woman Writer
Helen Smith (University of York): Out of Their Element
Kate Allan (Anglia Ruskin University): Ann Bathurst Distilled: Alchemical Metaphor in Rhapsodical Meditations and Visions
15.00 – 15.30: Coffee
15.30 – 17.00: Panel 2 – Intimacy and emotion
Elizabeth L. Swann (Durham University): “Let this comfort me”: Pulter, Cavendish, and the Poetics of Scientific Solace
Catherine Evans (University of Exeter): “She rolls her unctuous embryo east and west”: Hester Pulter’s “creaturely poetics” and the limits of the maternal body
Liza Blake (University of Toronto): '"Nature subsists by love": Sympathy without Sex in Katherine Phillips's Natural Philosophy.'
17.00 – 17.30: Coffee
17.30 – 19.00: Panel 3 – Playfulness, pleasure, satire
Charlotte Newcombe (University of York): Dancing Figures: Motion and Number in Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies (1653) and Philosophical Fancies (1653)
Louis Cameron (University of Cambridge): Laughing Matters: Lucy Hutchinson, De Rerum Natura, and the Satirical Poetics of Natural Philosophy
Enrico Piergiacomi (Israel Institute of Philosophy): “Cultivating the Brain” in Margaret Cavendish: Classical Sources and Christian Hedonism
19.30: Conference Dinner (Browns Brasserie, Trumpington Street)
Friday 27 June
9.30 – 10.45: Keynote – Helena Taylor, Atoms at Leisure in Early Modern France
10.45 – 11.15: Coffee
11.15 – 12.45: Panel 4 – Forms and tropes
Whitney Sperrazza (Texas A&M University): The Anatomical Elegy: or, Jane Barker sneaks in a philosophy lesson
J. D. Eynard (University of Cambridge): Margaret Cavendish’s Cobweb Poetics
Johanna Luggin (Ludwig Boltzmann Institute): Quadriga feminarum doctarum – Women’s Neo-Latin Poetry and Science
12.45 – 13.30: Lunch
13.30 – 14.30: Panel 5 – Minerals and magnetism
Jess Dunmore (University of Cambridge): ‘Margaret Cavendish and the Ecopoetics of Early Modern Natural Philosophy’
Friederike Altmann (University of Marburg): Magnet and iron – Natural philosophical knowledge in the devotional contemplations by Anna Sophia von Hessen-Darmstadt (1638-1683)
14.30 – 15.00: Coffee
15.00 – 16.30: Panel 6 – Collaboration and reception
Felix Sprang (University of Siegen): “Quin palma gaudet reddere dactylum ” – Elizabeth Jane Weston and Her Circle Versifying Plants
Annalisa Nicholson (King’s College London): ‘Tout est Lune, Soleil, Cercle, Orbe, Firmament’: Hortense Mancini, Fontenelle, and the Slippery Status of Mixed-Gender Collaborations
Greg Lynall (University of Liverpool): ‘To minds like thine these subjects best belong’: Encomia and elegies to natural philosophers by eighteenth-century female poets
16.30-17.00: closing discussion