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

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Florian Klaeger; Professorin Dr. Hania Siebenpfeiffer
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies ; German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 528050326

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.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: United Kingdom
• Partner Organisation: Arts and Humanities Research Council
• Cooperation Partners: Professorin Cassandra Gorman, Ph.D.; Professor Kevin Killeen, Ph.D.