Overview
- Draws on a wide range of material, from canonical works like 'King Lear' to the lesser known poems of Hester Pulter
- Includes fresh primary research from regional archives
- Presents familiar figures in the history of science such as Boyle and Bacon in new and illuminating ways
Part of the book series: Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern Literature (CKEML, volume 3)
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Keywords
- Shakespeare
- Humanism
- Literature and Cultural Studies
- Science and Literature
- British and Irish Literature
- Early Modern Period
- Literature, Science and Medicine Studies
About this book
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.
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Subha Mukherji is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge, UK. She is Editor-in-Chief of the Palgrave mini-series Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern England, and was Principal Investigator of the 5-year interdisciplinary ERC project, Crossroads of Knowledge, out of which the series, and this volume, emerge. She has published widely on early modern drama and law, law and literature, the poetics of space, literary epistemologies and Shakespeare. Her most recent work is Crossings: Migrant Knowledge, Migrant Forms (co-edited with Natalya Din-Kariuki and Rowan Williams), forthcoming with punctum books in 2024. She is writing a book on Knowing Encounters and editing Shakespeare and Fletcher's Henry VIII for the Cambridge Shakespeare Editions series.
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.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Poesy of Scientia in Early Modern England
Editors: Subha Mukherji, Elizabeth L. Swann
Series Title: Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern Literature
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-51799-0Due: 16 June 2024
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-51802-7Due: 16 June 2024
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-51800-3Due: 16 June 2024
Series ISSN: 2946-4455
Series E-ISSN: 2946-4463
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVII, 372
Number of Illustrations: 12 b/w illustrations