Call for Papers: Poetry and Science, From the Renaissance to Enlightenment, c.1580-1750

Posted on 21 July 2025

We invite proposals for the final conference of the AHRC-DFG project, ‘Scientific Poetry and Poetics in Britain and Germany, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, 1580-1750’.

The conference will be taking place on the 26 and 27 of June 2026.

Keynote: Katie Murphy and Tita Chico. Confirmed Speakers include: Liza Blake, Jonathan Sawday, Helen Smith, Lizzie Swann

From the late 16th and on into the first half of the 18th century, a large body of poetic writing addressed scientific subject matter. The conference explores this mass of scientific poetry – and a corresponding poetics of science – that reveals a vibrant facet of Renaissance, Restoration, and Enlightenment culture: the production not only of ideas, but of new, technical vocabularies and fast-paced neologizing, all forged in the particular demands of poetic form. Poetry, the era believed, did not function as mere ornament, but to reveal deep structures in the created world. This potential was theorized by the period’s emerging literary criticism, a practice that developed in demonstrable parallel with modern ‘science’.

We welcome proposals on scientific poetry of the era in any language, which might include (but is not limited to)

What makes a poem a scientific poem? Its subject matter? Its discursive-metaphorical language?
What is the relation between scientific knowledge and other forms of knowing?
What could poetry say beyond what prose could say?
How did ‘scientific poetry’ fit into the literary-poetic landscape of early modernity?
In what kind of places, literally or metaphorically understood, was scientific poetry produced, and how does the particularity of such places - universities, artisanal or professional worlds, religious centres – matter in understanding the writing?
What kinds of international and intercultural exchange and networks (Anglo-German and others) animate early modern scientific poetry, and what is the role of neo-Latin in this?
How did natural philosophy appeal as a subject to women or to non-elite writers?
How does the classical lineage of natural philosophical poetry – Hesiod, Aratus, Lucretius, Virgil and many others – or medieval forms – hexamera, didactic poetics - play into early modern forms of scientific writing?
How is scientific writing implicated in theological and physico-theological understandings of the world?
What kind of technical remit does such writing set for itself?
How does where we find such writing – in paratexts, in manuscripts, buried without prose texts – matter in understanding them?

Deadline for submissions: 30 September 2025.

Please send proposals for 20-minute papers, c. 200-250 words, with short biographies (c. 50-100 words) to: yorkconference@scientificpoetry.org

We welcome papers from early career scholars. The conference will be in English.

Please note that funding for the conference is limited, and acceptance of papers doesn’t include or imply covering the costs of accommodation and travel. We are hoping, however, to subsidise early career scholars, or others without any funding stream (and we’ll interpret that broadly), so please mention on your paper proposal if you’d like to be considered in that category, although it won’t affect in any way our decision.

Details available at Poetry and Science, From the Renaissance to Enlightenment website.

Any queries to Kevin Killeen at: yorkconference@scientificpoetry.org