When the modern natural sciences emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries, poetry was one of the means used to disseminate the new knowledge. "Scientific poetry lent itself to giving form to new ideas and thus legitimising them. It could make physical and metaphysical facts fruitful in a way that other text forms could not. Poetry was not mere ornament, but was intended to reveal deep structures in the created world," says Prof Dr Florian Klaeger, Professor of English Literature at the University of Bayreuth and one of the heads of the international project.
Examining a corpus of hitherto largely unexplored English and German scientific poems will shed light on an important cultural facet of the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. In addition to vernacular and neo-Latin scientific poetry dealing with topics from blood transfusion to flight theory, the project will explore a body of unknown and largely manuscript poetry by women such as Anne Southwell, Dorothy Calthorpe and Jane Barker, some of whom formulated and applied theological and scientific knowledge in surprising ways. Klaeger emphasises: "This means we are closing a gap, because although research has been studying the 'poetics of knowledge' for some time now, it has so far concentrated primarily on the vernacular prose of later periods, and on male authors. In contrast, the project aims to highlight the important contribution of early modern women poets." Another blind spot in research that will be addressed is the circulation of poetic and scientific knowledge between England and Germany during the European Early Enlightenment.
