When Science was Literature and Literature was Science

Clio Doyle on Claire Preston’s The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England

Astronomer Copernicus (1873) | Jan Matejko

Science was everywhere in the seventeenth century, especially in literature. For example, it was in this century that Duchess Margaret Cavendish wrote the first science fiction novel, The Blazing World (1666), exploring contemporary scientific discoveries by way of adventures among fish-men and bear-men. Another example of a different and strange mixture of science and literature is Phineas Fletcher’s poem, The Purple Island, which is a methodical description of human anatomy imagined metaphorically as an island landscape.

But Claire Preston, winner of the British Society for Literature and Science Prize in 2015, argues that statements such as these are insufficient to describe the relationship between so-called literature and science in the period—a period in which our modern categories of literature and science did not exist. Scientists wrote about their scientific theories and discoveries by inventing fictive dialogues staged in imaginary locations, and they often expressed their hopes for science in the form of poetry and fiction.

Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis, for example, is a romance, a sort of adventure novel, that imagines a utopian society that funds its scientists adequately and provides them with research space and all the equipment they need. Bacon’s romance describes an imaginary society in order to suggest an alternative role for science in his own society. The influence between what we call science and literature ran both ways. Literature was part of science. Not just part of the process of describing a scientific discovery post facto, but part of the nitty-gritty of science itself, part of how science understood the world that it, by its very nature, was in the business of understanding. Preston writes, “how to do science was not just an empirical question but also a rhetorical one: it was a question of how to say it”. And to figure out how to say and do science, scientists turned to poetry and fiction as far back as antiquity.

The Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, true to its title, tells a series of mythological stories involving human and animal transformations. In one of Ovid’s stories, the witch Medea pours a concoction of human blood and guts into her father-in-law’s neck in order to make him young again. She succeeds, but her real goal is revenge: she tricks the daughters of one of her enemies into cutting their father’s throat and thereby killing him in hopes of replicating the procedure. According to the prolific but perhaps not entirely trustworthy biographer John Aubrey, Francis Potter was reading this story when he was struck by an idea for a technique to transfuse blood. Although the technique did not work (Potter’s only recorded patient, a chicken, did not fare well), the anecdote does, at least as a way into Claire Preston’s book, The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in 17th Century England, (Oxford University Press, 2016). Potter and Aubrey are only the first introduced among a large and eccentric cast of characters indefatigably experimenting, debating, reading, and writing.

You could say, as I have been saying, that science was influenced by literature and literature by science. Preston does not. She says, they were the same thing. We are the ones who think they are different, with our literature departments and science departments, our two cultures, our clichés of brilliant but mad scientists and arcane literature professors.

However, there is one mad scientist in Preston’s book, James Harrington, a former political theorist driven mad by the punishments inflicted on him for his ideas, who “conducted the simplest of observational programmes when he sat in the sun to see if his sweat produced bees.” At once anecdote and analysis, this clause captures the mood of the book. It entertains without diminishing the complexity of its material. Harrington, whose bee-related madness could be traced to his imprisonment in the Tower of London for his political leanings after the reinstatement of monarchy in England following the English Civil War, becomes, in Preston’s hands, an illustration.

Harrington sweats alone, trapped in his fiction of bee-production—ironically, hoping to create monarchical insects. Harrington’s journey from political thinker and the author of a utopia describing a perfect republican government, discussing and refining his ideas through conversation in coffee houses, to “deranged empiricist” who made up “a private experimental locus consisting of the body” mirrors, for Preston, the wide range of contemporary ideas about where and how scientific knowledge could and should be generated.

Claire Preston, The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in 17th Century England, Oxford University Press, 2016. pp. 310. $150 (hardcover)

Preston close-reads Harrington, finding in his body a kind of laboratory, its lonely seclusion showing one way of imagining what a place for science would look like. The laboratory as we know it was still in the process of being invented. The question of where to do science and the degree of privacy needed for it was still in question, to the extent that there was a recurrent fantasy (and occasional reality) of science and scientific discussions taking place outside. Readings like this, tying biographical accounts of scientists to letters discussing experiments, to diagrams depicting how to carve out room for scientific endeavors in a domestic space, are the real strength of the book.

I draw these details from Preston’s third chapter, which describes utopian visions of scientific meeting-places, from pastoral landscapes to entire academies dedicated to science, as well as real-world solutions to the question of where science could or should take place. This chapter is charming in its mixture of the fantastical and the mundane. Scientists imagined a pastoral landscape complete with nymphs and shepherds as a perfect place for scientific debate, while carving out room in a corner of their kitchens to perform experiments.

Her other chapters range widely. There is one on the scientist Robert Boyle’s experiments with different genres such as romance and pastoral, one on the rhetoric of scientific correspondence, one on the preoccupation with the countryside, as a place for scientific enquiry. However, perhaps most intriguing is the first chapter, which discusses the neologisms of Sir Thomas Browne, natural philosopher and doctor.

Browne (according at least to the Oxford English Dictionary) coined more words than any other scientist writing in English, ranging from the obscure “castrensial” (of the interval between Roman camps) to the charming “hornycoat” (cornea). Browne expanded the descriptive possibilities of the English language in an attempt to use that language as a scientific tool.

In the early modern period, before scientists could take advantage of the various methods of measurement available to them today, accurate description was a vital part of scientific study. Browne’s desire for precision is described by Preston as a spur to his search for—and frequent invention of—he right word. Preston mentions Shakespeare, celebrated for the number of first uses of words attributed to him by the Oxford English Dictionary, in passing. To compare the two men’s neologistic aptitude is to imagine a way in which you could bring literature and science into the same dialog, one in which both sides were inventing words to describe a shifting and uncertain world. Browne’s neologisms, Boyle’s pastorals, even Harrington’s bees are different ways of approaching a world that does not stand still to be approached.

Preston writes this book, itself a sort of utopian vision of harmony between science and literature, in a world, and particularly in an academy, in which science and literature are so often opposed—most obviously in the necessity for students of choosing a major, of dividing their time between taking and studying for classes in different disciplines, and of deciding what discipline to study at graduate level. In the United Kingdom, where Preston works, it is common for students to apply to study one or two specific subjects exclusively at university, resulting in even more specialization than the American system.

The book asks an important one: what do science and the humanities say to each other, what do they have in common? Preston finds in the two a common history, in which each informs each other. Her book is no manifesto for the death of disciplines—far from it. Rather she reads seventeenth-century science not as literature, but because it is what we consider literature. It was not until the eighteenth century, Preston argues, that literature and science became “obviously segregated.”

In the modern world, practitioners of literature and science rarely have much idea of what their counterparts are doing. Of course, there are exceptions, and Preston mentions Christian Bök, whose Xenotext project involves encoding poetry into the genome of a bacterium, in which the bacterium will continue reproducing and altering beyond the end of the human race. The first book of the project, in part a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, contains a long section on “Colony Collapse Disorder,” which ties a translation of a passage from Virgil’s Georgics to the worldwide collapse of honeybee colonies. Bök’s project seems to allow for the mutual metamorphosis of literature and science, or at least literature and a bug that wakes up one day transformed into a poem. Preston hints at a narrative of decline, one in which literature and science are now all too often separated by ignorance. But one wonders what a continuation of her project would look like, taking the twinned story of science and literature into the present day with the same breadth of research and depth of insight that she brings to the seventeenth century.

Literary critics are in a sort of middle ground between science and literature. Seventeenth-century literary specialists tend to have an interest in the history of science, if perhaps less of an understanding of what is happening in today’s laboratories and scientific journals. But we also work in the same places as many scientists: universities, although often on different parts of campus. One thinks of the charts and graphs and data tables that increasingly can be found in almost any literary journal, flirting with the scientific method. I wonder what the scientists are doing over there, across campus. Are they continuing to be shaped, in some way, by the genres and expectations and words of poetry and fiction? Or are we all like Harrington, caught in our private stories, muttering about bees?

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Clio Doyle is a Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at Queen Mary University of London. She holds a BA in English Language and Literature from Merton College, Oxford, and a PhD in English and Renaissance Studies and an MPhil in Medieval Studies from Yale University.