The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England

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 England examines 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.

Claire Preston, Professor of Renaissance Literature, Queen Mary University of London

Claire Preston is Professor of Renaissance Literature at Queen Mary University of London. Her books include Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early-Modern Science (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Bee (Reaktion, 2006), and Edith Wharton's Social Register (Macmillan/St Martin's, 2000). She is the
recipient of Guggenheim and British Academy research awards and of the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize from the British Academy.