Down to Earth: Literary Form, Didactics, and the Natural World, c. 1550–1750 (29 September 2022, Bayreuth)
This event explores the relationship between literature and science in the early modern period with a focus on the role of poetics (broadly conceived) in the formalisation, dissemination, and popularisation of scientific insights for didactic purposes. Botany, medicine, and astronomy serve as touchstones for discussion, being emblematic bodies of knowledge that studied the earthly/biological/microcosm and heavenly/cosmological/macrocosm respectively. By exploring, from the perspective of didactics, the connections between discrete fields that shared the aim of formalising knowledge of natural phenomena, the event aims to stimulate discussion about the role that literary models and modes played in enabling the often complex systems studied by naturalists to become widely understood and re-imagined.
Programme
Venue: University of Bayreuth, GW I, S120
| 9.00-9.15 | Justin Begley (LMU Munich) and Florian Klaeger (University of Bayreuth): Welcome and opening remarks |
| 9.15-10.15 | Keynote: Yasmin Haskell (University of Western Australia): Lucretius and the Jesuits: Science, Superstition, Suppression |
| 10.15-10.45 | Coffee break |
Pedagogic Science and Medicine | |
| 10.45-11.25 | Fabrizio Baldassarri (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice): Botany in Early Modern Institutions and Laboratories: Books & Experiments |
| 11.25-12.05 | Benjamin Goldberg (University of South Florida): Pedagogy in William Harvey’s Prelectiones Anatomie Universalis |
| 12.05-1.00 | Lunch |
Poetic Astronomy, Astronomical Poetics | |
| 1.00-1.40 | Jeremy Thompson (independent scholar): Towards a Corpus Astronomicum: Past Lives of a Minor Latin Poetry |
| 1.40-2.20 | Cassandra Gorman (Anglia Ruskin University): Wax Balls and Wings: The Cosmological Poetics of Anne Southwell |
| 2.20-3.00 | Jonas Kempf (University of Bayreuth): Cosmopoetic Form-Knowledge: Neoplatonic Thought in Early Modern English Astronomy Textbooks |
| 3.00-3.30 | Coffee break |
Enlightenment Science and the Public | |
| 3.30-4.10 | Christoffer Basse Eriksen (Humboldt-Universität Berlin): Traversing the Skies and the Seas: The Global World of Voltaire’s ‘Micromégas’ |
| 4.10-4.50 | Valdemar Pold (Aarhus University): Frederik Christian Eilschov and the Introduction of the Fictive Dialogue as Science Communication in Denmark-Norway, 1746–1750 |
| 4.50-5.00 | Closing remarks |
