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

该项目探索了大量不为人知的科学诗歌，涵盖地质和海洋科学、植物学和物理神学，以及相应的科学诗学，揭示了文艺复兴、复辟和启蒙文化的一个充满活力的方面：不仅是思想的产生，而且是新的、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形成的。这种写作并不等同于散文，而是积极地理解它的实践，以解决世界的细微差别，无论是物质的还是形而上学的，这是散文无法探究的。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。这种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，这种实践是在与现代“科学”可论证的平行中发展起来的。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，以及大量的新拉丁诗歌，主题从输血到飞行理论。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。最近的许多研究都涉及了早期现代科学的诗学，但它们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。这门学科才刚刚开始探索17和18世纪诗歌形式在交流自然哲学知识方面的具体启示，以及被认为为这两个领域提供信息的共同想象过程。这个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。该项目开启了英德对欧洲公共文学尚未被研究的视角，并通过对各自文本语料库和档案发现的探索，合作有望揭示正式传统及其历史轨迹中的联系和其他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.