Poetry and Science

Abstract

In 1667, the same year that the poet Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle upon Tyne, famously became the first woman to visit the Royal Society, Thomas Sprat (author and Fellow) declared that literary and scientific discourses were antithetical. Sprat’s history of the Society resolved “to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style,” instead “bringing all things as near the mathematical plainness” (Sprat, 1667). But Cavendish is one of many women poets who were excluded from the formal institutions of academia and science and yet carved out their own imaginative and intellectual spaces from this position of exclusion to produce writing that fused the literary and scientific. This entry provides an introduction to the scientific poetry of late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women and to the critical discourse surrounding their work. Poets addressed include Isabella Whitney, Anne Bradstreet, Katherine Philips, Lucy Hutchinson, Hester Pulter, Margaret Cavendish, and Jane Barker. The entry details the ways in which the work of these poets engages with scientific and natural philosophic thought in the period, in particular medicine, alchemy, matter theory, astronomy, and anatomy.