The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England [Paperback]

This study examines the way that scientists in the 16th and 17th centuries, who had not studied 'science' formally, used the tools of their literary education to formulate ideas about science and, at the same time, how the remarkable seventeenth-century scientific developments inspired non-scientific writers to make new fictions of discovery.How should science be written? It is a question that piqued natural philosophers of the seventeenth century as they experimented with the rhetorical figures, neologisms, verse-forms, and generic variety that characterise the literary texture of their work. Inspired laymen were quick to borrow from the new philosophy and from practising scientists in order to deploy ideas and images from astronomy, optics, chemistry, biology, and medicine. Between them, scientists, natural historians, poets, dramatists, and essayists produced new, adjusted, or hybrid literary forms.The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century Englandexamines those forms and that literary-scientific texture, as well as representations of the scientific--the laboratory, collaborative experimental retirement, and the canons of scientific conversation--and proposes that the writing of seventeenth-century science mirrors the intellectual and investigative processes of early modern science itself.Introduction 'A Distemper of Learning': The Languages of Science1. Orlando Curioso: The Lapsarian Style of Thomas Browne2. Equivocal Boyle and the Enamelled Telescope3. 'A Blessing in the Wilderness': Fictions of Polity and the Place of Science4. Dining Out in the Republic of Letters: The Rhetoric of Scientific Correspondence5. The Counsel of Herbs: Scientific GeorgicBibliographyIndexClaire Preston,Professor of Renaissance Literature, Queen Mary University of LondonClaire Prestonis Professor of Renaissance Literature at Queen Mary University of London. Her books includeThomas Browne and the Writing of Early-Modern Sciencl²