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

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Scientific Poetry and Poetics in Britain and Germany, from the Renaissance to the EnlightenmentThis project explores a mass of largely-unknown scientific poetry, ranging across sciences such as geology, astronomy and botany, and a corresponding poetics of science, an imaginative-aesthetic quality to the emerging disciplines. It will reveal a vibrant facet of Renaissance, Restoration, and Enlightenment culture: the production not only of new ideas, but new forms and vocabularies in which to think through those ideas. This poetic writing did not serve as an equivalent of prose, or a mere popularisation of 'real' science, 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 theorised 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 analyse 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. While recent work has addressed the rhetorical character of early modern science, it has focused almost exclusively on prose writing, often of a later period, by male writers, in the vernaculars. This research will show how, in the 17th and 18th centuries, poetic writing was not only central to communicating natural philosophical knowledge, but how shared imaginative processes were thought to inform both domains. One consequence of this blind spot in the scholarship 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 in disciplines that have come to be understood, in debates on the 'two cultures' of science and humanities, as antithetical and antagonistic.