Subproject 06
Jacques de Vaucanson's Digesting Duck (1738)
Philosophia cantat. Negotiating Epistemic Ruptures in Early Modern Philosophical and Scientific Didactic Poetry
Prof. Dr. Bernd Roling (Institut für Griechische und Lateinische Philologie, Freie Universität Berlin)
The subproject explores the transformation of the generic concept of didactic poetry in the Early Modern Period in the face of new extraliterary influences and a lively interaction with the vernacular languages. The renewed reception of Lucretius’ didactic poem gave rise to a revival and expansion of the structural strategies that had been dominated in the ‘Virgilian period’ by the integrative type of philosophical poetry. Based on the Lucretian model, it now became possible to place a stronger emphasis on confrontation and on the pluralism of competing ideologies. The growing influence of Aristotelian poetics from the 16th century onward, combined with the development of a more and more complex and independent scientific discourse, led to the formulation of new demands that the genre of didactic poetry was expected to meet. How did textual production respond to the chorus of competing voices concerning the poetological dimension of didactic poetry, and what kind of relationship existed between poetics and literary practice? The project will broaden the scope of this question further by taking into account the interrelations between Latinity and the vernacular. The phenomenon of Latin as a language of transfer allowed for the dissemination of texts throughout all of Europe and reinforced their impact via the numerous translations and retranslations that took place in constant interaction between Latin and the vernacular languages, Paracelsian philosophy being a particularly pertinent example. Did vernacular traditions of didactic poetry exist that reconfigured themselves through the recourse to Latinity? Did amalgamations of Latinity and the vernacular emerge, which in turn were capable of generating their own generic conventions? Among the examples that illustrate the synergy effects between Latinity and the vernacular are Vanière’s agricultural magnum opus with its constant references to vernacular specialist literature which, by the middle of the 18th century, had turned into a standard textbook, and Du Bartas’ Sepmaine, which engendered a new hybrid type of biblical and didactic poem in the vernacular. These synergy effects in scientific poetry will be the project’s main concern.