Scientific Poetry and Poetics in Britain and Germany, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

这个项目探索了大量鲜为人知的科学诗歌，涉及地质学和海洋科学、植物学和物理神学，以及相应的科学诗学，揭示了文艺复兴、复兴和启蒙文化充满活力的一面：不仅产生了思想，而且产生了新的、技术词汇和快节奏的新词，所有这些都是在诗歌形式的特殊要求下锻造的。这篇文章不等同于散文，但肯定地理解了它的做法，以解决世界的细微差别，物理和形而上学，散文不能垂直。那个时代认为，诗歌的功能不仅仅是装饰品，而是揭示创造世界的深层结构。这一潜力被这一时期新兴的文学批评所理论化，研究将表明，这种实践的发展与现代科学并驾齐驱。该项目将挖掘和分析一批女性作品，其中大部分仍处于手稿中，这些作品将其理论科学思想运用到令人眼花缭乱的效果中，以及大量关于从输血到飞行理论等主题的新拉丁诗句。它还将展示这一非凡的科学文献体系及其灵活的诗学的传播，其影响可以在北欧各地的一系列网络中看到--用拉丁语、德语和英语，它还将追溯悠久的说教科学诗句如何在17世纪末和18世纪初以特别戏剧性的效果发生变化和变异。这项研究解决了英语和德语学术研究中的空白。最近的许多工作都涉及到早期现代科学的诗学，但它几乎完全集中在男性作家的散文写作上，通常是后期的白话。这门学科才刚刚开始探索17世纪和18世纪诗歌形式对交流自然哲学知识的具体启示，实际上是被认为为这两个领域提供信息的共同想象过程。这一盲点的一个后果是彻底忽视了欧洲启蒙运动早期的一次重大的英德诗学转移。该项目对那个时代的诗学理念的重新表述--它的宇宙论、神学和物理神学--关系到我们如何理解新兴美学，在这个对英国和德国的语言来说都是最动荡的时期。它还将揭示科学知识和诗歌形式的构成和参照密度，这些作品之所以受到重视，正是因为它的论述波动性和万花筒般的能力。该项目打开了英德对尚未被研究的欧洲公共资源的视角，通过对各自的文本语料库和档案发现的探索，合作有望揭示正式传统及其历史轨迹中的联系和隐藏的相似之处和差异。

This project explores a mass of largely-unknown scientific poetry, ranging across geology and sea-science, botany and physico-theology, 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. This writing did not serve as an equivalent of prose, but positively understood its practice to address nuances of the world, physical and metaphysical, that prose could not plumb. 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, the research will show, 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, and it will trace how a long history of didactic scientific verse morphs and mutates with particularly dramatic effects in the late 17th and early 18th century. The 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 a thoroughgoing 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.