Poetry and Natural History in Early Modern Europe

Literature and Natural History in Early Modern Europe uncovers the neglected yet highly significant relationship between literary writing and natural history between the 1450s and the 1620s, focusing on the ways in which the capacious mode of ‘historia’ practised by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History was reworked for the distinct cultural priorities of 16th-century writers and thinkers. Intellectual historians including Brian Ogilvie have in recent years argued for recognition that the practices of Renaissance natural historians did vital work that enabled the ‘scientific revolution’ of the 17th century, while it has become a commonplace to explore how in the 17th and 18th centuries imaginative writing – be this prose or poetry – acted as a space in which scientific hypotheses could gain ontological clout (Frédérique Aït-Touati) and descriptive modes of writing that will become the hallmark of scientific discourse develop (Claire Preston). My book shows that the presence of natural history in Renaissance culture was far more diverse and wide-reaching than has been suggested and, moreover, that the influence of Pliny’s Natural History continued well beyond the supposed undermining of his authority occasioned by discoveries in the New World and the rise of empirical methods. Pliny’s historia represented not only a storehouse of marvels and wonders about nature but, perhaps surprisingly, given the availability of more straightforwardly literary classical models, was used by Renaissance authors of poetry and fiction as inspiration for their methods as writers, from ideas about what a poet needs to know to write vividly about nature to theories of borrowing and originality. Rigorous in its faithful depiction of the cultural particularity of the Renaissance, my book at the same time, and more generally, will makes its readers think harder about the resources on which literature draws, processes of imitation and composition, and the distinctiveness or otherwise of the literary.