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鲜为人知的科学诗歌，涉及地质学、天文学和植物学等科学，以及相应的科学诗学，这是新兴学科的一种想象力-美学品质。它将揭示文艺复兴、复兴和启蒙文化充满活力的一面：不仅产生新的想法，而且还产生新的形式和词汇来思考这些想法。这种诗意的写作并不等同于散文，也不是简单的“真正”科学的普及，而是积极地理解了它的实践，以解决散文无法深入研究的物质和形而上学的世界的细微差别。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，这种实践是在与现代科学平行的情况下发展起来的。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篇。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。虽然最近的研究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男性作家的散文写作上，通常是后期的白话。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，而且共同的想象过程被认为是如何为这两个领域提供信息的。这一学术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。该项目开启了英德对尚未被研究的欧洲公共文明的视角，并通过探索各自的文本语料库和档案发现，合作有望揭示在关于科学和人文这两种文化的辩论中被理解为对立和对立的学科中的联系和否则隐藏的相似之处。