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Thesis ID: CBB001561377

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

University of Virginia
Kinney, Daniel
Publication date: 2008
Language: English

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

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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.

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

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