IsisCB Explore

Thesis ID: CBB001561377

Error's License: Defending Poetry and Science in Renaissance England (2008)

University of Virginia
Kinney, Daniel

Publication Date: 2008
Edition Details: Advisor: Kinney, Daniel
Physical Details: 293 pp.
Language: English

Outside Links

Academia.edu

Poetry and poetics Natural philosophy Science and literature Humanism 15th century Renaissance 16th century England Bacon, Francis, 1st Baron Verulam Sidney, Philip Spenser, Edmund

As far back as Plato, poetry's critics have claimed that it is a form of false knowledge. Such critiques were given Christianized authority by Augustine. Likewise, over the course of the Renaissance, similar accusations were made against those, such as Desiderius Erasmus, who sought to establish the text of the bible and, eventually, those who sought to further the reach of natural philosophy. However, those critiques were confronted in the Renaissance by Christian humanists such as Boccaccio, Juan Luis Vives, and Erasmus himself, each of whom claimed that knowledge, whether poetic or proto-scientific, if applied to the work of charity, could be redeemed. This dissertation shows the ways in which it is on the claim for charity that both Philip Sidney and Francis Bacon draw for their seemingly very different defenses of poetry and science, respectively. It is also to a charitable end that Spenser seeks to put his Faerie Queene. Eventually, the claim for the charitable uses of knowledge, originally derived from defenses of poetry, would become essential to those writings of the Royal Society that promoted science, even where the Royal Society tried to divorce itself from the perceived errors of poetry and of language itself. This new understanding of the genealogy of the defenses and aims of science requires us to reconsider an important moment in the early history of modernity and to re-examine the degree to which claims for the benefits of science to humankind (claims that persist down to the present day) may be rooted in the same kinds of Christianized cultural demands that were, once upon a time, made of poetry.

...More

Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 69/04 (2008). Pub. no. AAT 3312196.

Citation URI

https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001561377/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Chapter Raman, Shankar; (2012)
Constructing Selves, Making Publics: Geometry and Poetry in Descartes and Sidney (/isis/citation/CBB001201597/)

Thesis Hodes, Nathaniel; (2014)
The Muses' Method: Logic and the Moral Function of English Renaissance Poetry (/isis/citation/CBB001567584/)

Thesis Dye, Amy; (2005)
Writing Creation in England, 1580--1680 (/isis/citation/CBB001560880/)

Book Hirai, Hiro; (2011)
Medical Humanism and Natural Philosophy: Renaissance Debates on Matter, Life, and the Soul (/isis/citation/CBB001250502/)

Thesis Passannante, Gerard Paul; (2007)
The Lucretian Renaissance: Ancient Poetry and Humanism in an Age of Science (/isis/citation/CBB001560763/)

Article Clulee, Nicholas H.; (2012)
John Dee's Ideas and Plans for a National Research Institute (/isis/citation/CBB001251140/)

Chapter Locatelli, Angela; (2010)
Discursive Intersections on the Subject of “Light” in English Renaissance Literature (/isis/citation/CBB001024886/)

Chapter Berg, Sara van den; (2013)
Dwarf Aesthetics in Spenser's Faerie Queene and the Early Modern Court (/isis/citation/CBB001201693/)

Thesis Daniel D. Lee; (2019)
Making Experience Literate: Poetry and New Science in Early Modern England (/isis/citation/CBB322645098/)

Chapter Moudarres, Andrea; (2012)
The Geography of the Enemy: Old and New Empires between Humanist Debates and Tasso's Gerusalemme liberate (/isis/citation/CBB001201661/)

Article Ovanes Akopyan; (2018)
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola on Tides (/isis/citation/CBB357666630/)

Article Oosterhoff, Richard J.; (2013)
From Pious to Polite: Pythagoras in the Res publica litterarum of French Renaissance Mathematics (/isis/citation/CBB001201307/)

Article Hirai, Hiro; (2007)
Semence, vertu formatrice et intellect agent chez Nicolò Leoniceno entre la tradition arabo-latine et la renaissance des commentateurs grecs (/isis/citation/CBB000772561/)

Thesis Williams, Travis Dean; (2006)
Ethos and Enargeia: Literary and Rhetorical Strategies of Early Modern Mathematics (/isis/citation/CBB001561461/)

Article Vengeon, Frédéric; (2006)
Mathématiques, création et humanisme chez Nicolas de Cues (/isis/citation/CBB000770984/)

Article Kircher, Timothy; (2015)
Renaissance Humanism and Its Discontents (/isis/citation/CBB001553172/)

Book Laetitia Rimpau; (2021)
Visionen Neuer Wissenschaft: Zur Dialogischen Dichtung Von Dante Alighieri Und Johannes Kepler (/isis/citation/CBB771504606/)

Thesis Aleksander, Jason; (2007)
The Disavowal of Renaissance Philosophical Crises and the Geneses of ModernPhilosophy and Science (/isis/citation/CBB001561292/)

Article García Valverde, José Manuel; (2007)
El galenismo crítico de Girolamo Cardano: Análisis de la presencia de galeno en el De Immortalitate Animorum (/isis/citation/CBB000831503/)

Book Katherine Eggert; (2015)
Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England (/isis/citation/CBB719360599/)

Comments

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}