Event Information:

• Wed

  19

  Nov

  2025

  Creation Physics and the early modern enthusiast: Science, poetry and the kaleidoscopic bible.(Prof. Kevin Killeen, University of York)

  6-8 c.t. pmFreie Universität Berlin, Institut für Philosophie

  Guest lecture as part of the SPP2130 subproject ‘German Mysticism in Translation’ (led by Prof Dr Cecilia Muratori, Prof Dr Anne Eusterschulte). This talk will focus on three pieces of scientific poetry, and the way in which early modern gush – that quintessential way of speaking amongst radicals and enthusiasts – had its epistemological cousin, a way of thinking about multiple sciences, kaleidoscopically imagined. It will focus on works by two largely unknown poets, Anne Southwell (c. 1620) and Mary Chudleigh (1703), and the ways in which they incorporate natural philosophy into their poems, pivoting between these with attention to Samuel Pordage (1661) whose quasi-epic poem produced a surging, angelic, mystico-philosophical version of Jacob Boehme's alles-in-allem poetics of the universe. (further information)