When debating the structure of the cosmos, Raphael delivers to Adam perhaps Milton's most famous line: "be lowly wise." With the promise to "justify the ways of God to men," Milton does not limit man's knowledge to base matters, but reclaims the heights of "other worlds" for the poet. Over the course of the seventeenth century, the natural philosophers' material explanations of the natural order were slowly gaining authority over other sources of knowledge, the poets prime among them. My dissertation takes up the competing early modern claims to knowledge that Milton lays down for Adam. I argue that natural philosophy, what today we call "science," emerged as the dominant authority over knowledge by appropriating the poet's imagination. The poet's imagination had long revealed the divine hand that marked nature--a task that, as Sidney put it, merited the poet a "peerlesse" rank among other professions. For Bacon, Galileo, and Royal Society fellows, the poetic imagination revealed material explanations of nature's order that other orthodox models and methods could not. For the first decades of the seventeenth century, the imagination aligned poetry and natural philosophy as complementary pursuits of knowledge: Sidney's poet was to imagine a "golden" world that revealed the divine order, the material cause of which Bacon's natural philosopher was to discover in nature. But as the Royal Society fellows countered the claim that they peddled fancies, they severed ties with the poet. In one ingenious rhetorical move, Royal Society fellows proclaimed themselves to have perfected the poet's imaginative work, securing the imagination for natural philosophy while disavowing poetry as the product of an idle fancy. Such rhetoric proved as powerful then as it does now. For Margaret Cavendish, the poet occupies the supplemental role that "recreate[s] the mind" once it grows tired of the "serious" natural philosophical studies. After the Restoration, then, the important role of the poetic imagination would go largely unrecognized even as it set itself to work in what would become the separate disciplines of literature and science.
...More
Book
Cummins, Juliet;
Burchell, David;
(2007)
Science, Literature, and Rhetoric in Early Modern England
(/isis/citation/CBB000774600/)
Book
Lipking, Lawrence;
(2014)
What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution
(/isis/citation/CBB001510101/)
Thesis
Daniel D. Lee;
(2019)
Making Experience Literate: Poetry and New Science in Early Modern England
(/isis/citation/CBB322645098/)
Book
Giuseppe Patota;
(2023)
Parole di Galileo
(/isis/citation/CBB522118146/)
Thesis
Hodes, Nathaniel;
(2014)
The Muses' Method: Logic and the Moral Function of English Renaissance Poetry
(/isis/citation/CBB001567584/)
Book
David Carroll Simon;
(2018)
Light without Heat: The Observational Mood from Bacon to Milton
(/isis/citation/CBB010485781/)
Article
Henderson, Felicity;
(2013)
Faithful Interpreters? Translation Theory and Practice at the Early Royal Society
(/isis/citation/CBB001211978/)
Book
Danielson, Dennis Richard;
(2014)
“Paradise Lost” and the Cosmological Revolution
(/isis/citation/CBB001510030/)
Book
Cook, Harold John;
Dupré, Sven;
(2012)
Translating Knowledge in the Early Modern Low Countries
(/isis/citation/CBB001420402/)
Book
Giulia Virgilio;
(2023)
Parole al microscopio: i composti neoclassici nell'italiano delle scienze tra Settecento e primo Ottocento
(/isis/citation/CBB267827261/)
Thesis
Nese Devenot;
(2015)
Altered States/Other Worlds: Romanticism, Nitrous Oxide, and the Literary Prehistory of Psychedelia
(/isis/citation/CBB236966671/)
Thesis
Lisa Lynn Chen Obrist;
(2015)
Time and How to Calculate It: A Study and Edition with Translation of Book 10 of Hrabanus Maurus’ "De rerum naturis"
(/isis/citation/CBB862549669/)
Book
Nataša Raschi;
(2020)
La langue des mathématiques chez Diderot
(/isis/citation/CBB984952533/)
Thesis
B. Josh Doty;
(2016)
The Anatomy of Conscience: Science, Ethics, and Religion in Nineteenth-century American Literature
(/isis/citation/CBB174403585/)
Thesis
Jessica Rezunyk;
(2015)
Science and Nature in the Medieval Ecological Imagination
(/isis/citation/CBB491107306/)
Article
Johannes, Gert-Jan;
(2011)
“Nationale filologieën” en het historisch onderzoek naar disciplinevorming in de geesteswetenschappen. Een verkenning
(/isis/citation/CBB001251325/)
Book
Jeffrey M. Binder;
(2022)
Language and the Rise of the Algorithm
(/isis/citation/CBB179423817/)
Book
James Dougal Fleming;
(2016)
The Mirror of Information in Early Modern England: John Wilkins and the Universal Character
(/isis/citation/CBB316697645/)
Thesis
Moshenska, Joseph;
(2011)
“Feeling Pleasures”: The Sense of Touch in Renaissance England
(/isis/citation/CBB001567300/)
Article
Kelley, Shannon;
(2014)
The King's Coral Body: A Natural History of Coral and the Post-Tragic Ecology of The Tempest
(/isis/citation/CBB001421599/)
Be the first to comment!