Poetry, Anatomy, and Women's Scientific Work in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England

FAIN: FEL-282528-22

Whitney Sperrazza
Rochester Institute of Technology (Rochester, NY 14623-5603)

Research and writing leading to a book on women’s poetry and scientific work in 16th- and 17th-century England. 

My project traces a new history of women’s engagement with science. Studies of this history have focused on women directly contributing to scientific work or publicly engaging with scientific debates. I instead turn to women writers experimenting with new ways to make poetry in 16th- and 17th-century England, at the height of new innovations in anatomy. Anatomists increasingly relied on dissection for their study, and were exploring how to transfer knowledge gained through hands-on work into texts. Similarly, my project’s poets were using their pages as epistemological tools—instruments for studying how to represent the work of women’s bodies, as writers, readers, and knowledge practitioners. Reading women’s poetry with anatomical texts reveals a shared set of material-tactile practices that informed early modern poetic and scientific work. My interdisciplinary study challenges readers to rethink what counts as science and brings into focus a feminist poetic history centered on touch.