The Poesy of Scientia in Early Modern England

This book explores interconnections between the modes of knowing that we now associate with the rubrics ’literature’ and ’science’ at a formative point in their early development. Rather than simply tracing lines of influence, it focuses on how both literary texts and natural philosophy engage with materiality, language, affect, and form. Some essays are invested in how early modern science adopts and actively experiments with rhetorical and poetic modes and expression, while others emphasize a shared investment in natural philosophical topics--alchemy, chance, or astrology for example--that move among the period’s observational texts and its literature, highlighting the participation of literary texts in the production of experimental knowledge. Organised around the broad themes of creation and transformation, mediation and communication, and interpretation and imaginative speculation, the essays collectively probe the presumed dichotomy between science’s schematizing and taxonomic ambitions, and the fertile and volatile creative energies of literary texts.

Subha Mukherji is Principle Investigator of the ERC project, Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern England: the Place of Literature. She teaches English at the University of Cambridge, UK, and at Fitzwilliam College. She has published widely on various aspects of Renaissance English literature, interdisciplinary approaches, and literary epistemologies.

Elizabeth Swann is Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies at Durham University, UK. Her previous publications include a monograph, Taste and Knowledge in Early Modern England (2020), and she has a new short book, Science as Child’s Play in Seventeenth-Century England: Innocence, Experience, and Experiment, forthcoming with Palgrave Pivot in 2024.