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

英国和德国的科学诗歌和诗学，从文艺复兴到启蒙运动

• 批准号: AH/Y007530/1
• 负责人: Kevin Killeen
• 金额: $ 44.7万
• 依托单位: University of York
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2024
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2024 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FY007530%2F1
• 关键词: Scientific; Poetry; Poetics; Britain; Germany

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.

英国和德国的科学诗歌和诗学，从文艺复兴到启蒙运动这个项目探索了大量不为人知的科学诗歌，涵盖了地质学、天文学和植物学等学科，以及相应的科学诗学，一种新兴学科的想象美学品质。它将揭示文艺复兴、复辟和启蒙文化充满活力的一面：不仅产生了新思想，而且产生了思考这些思想的新形式和新词汇。这种诗歌写作并不等同于散文，或者仅仅是“真正的”科学的普及，而是积极地理解它的实践，以解决世界上的细微差别，无论是物理的还是形而上学的，这是散文无法触及的。那个时代认为，诗歌的作用不仅仅是装饰，而是揭示被创造世界的深层结构。这一潜力是由这一时期新兴的文学批评理论提出的，研究将表明，这一实践与现代科学是并行发展的。该项目将挖掘和分析女性的大量作品，其中大部分仍在手稿中，这些作品将神科学思想发挥到令人眼花缭乱的效果，以及大量关于从输血到飞行理论等主题的新拉丁诗歌。它还将展示这一惊人的科学文献及其敏捷的诗学的传播，其影响可以在北欧的一系列网络中看到——在拉丁语、德语和英语中，它将追溯17世纪末和18世纪初，说教式科学诗歌的漫长历史是如何演变和变异的，并产生了特别戏剧性的影响。该研究解决了英国和德国学术研究的空白。虽然最近的工作已经解决了早期现代科学的修辞特征，但它几乎完全集中在散文写作上，通常是后期的男性作家用白话写的。这项研究将展示，在17世纪和18世纪，诗歌写作不仅是交流自然哲学知识的核心，而且人们认为共享的想象过程如何为这两个领域提供信息。这种学术盲点的一个后果是彻底忽视了早期欧洲启蒙运动中英德诗歌向科学的重大转变。该项目对那个时代诗歌思想的重新表述——它的宇宙论，它的神论和它的物理神学——影响着我们如何理解在这个最动荡的时期，对于英国和德国的方言来说，新兴的美学。它还将揭示大量关于科学知识和诗歌形式的构成和参考密度的信息，正是由于其话语的波动性和万花筒的能力，写作才受到重视。该项目开启了英德两国对尚未被研究的欧洲文学的观点，并通过对各自文本语料库和档案发现的探索，合作有望揭示在科学和人文“两种文化”的辩论中已经被理解的学科中的联系和其他隐藏的相似之处，作为对立和对抗。