Courses

In this seminar, we will study English Renaissance poetry in light of the period’s obsession with the experimental. Prior to the English Renaissance, “experiment” was simply a synonym for “experience.” But in the mid-sixteenth century, the term begins a curious shift, taking on a new, far different meaning: an “experiment” becomes an active process, a way of creating new knowledge not by passively observing the world but by acting on it and studying the results. While best known today for its lasting influence on the study of science, this shift produced a culture of experimentation that pervaded England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, provoking social and cultural experiments that tested and challenged political structures, religious practices and identities, and accepted knowledge about the natural world and humanity’s place in it. At the same time, the culture of experiment extended into literature: Renaissance poets experimented, with dizzying frequency, with new forms, genres, techniques, and subjects to produce novel understandings about what a poem was and what sorts of things it could do; poetic experiments, in other words, became a way of responding to and influencing social and cultural experiments. Poets, like their scientific counterparts, did not limit themselves to observing and describing the world around them––they in turn experimented on it through their written work, testing new forms and new techniques of writing as methods for describing this new culture of experiment.