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lecture by Professor Claire Preston. Claire Preston is Professor
of Early-Modern Literature at the University of Birmingham.
Succulent, cretaceous, technology, parasitical, electricity . .
. Scientific investigation in the seventeenth century generated
new ideas, and scientists needed new words to express them.
Experimentalists, observers, collectors, and technicians all
contributed to a supple descriptive language for the new science
and its related disciplines. Verbal invention is especially
marked in those who, like Sir Thomas Browne, operated at the
margins of the scientific and the literary. At the same time,
natural philosophers of the period were battling the ancient
prejudice against the rhetorical arts; their creative extensions
of English had to be balanced with clearing the discourses of
knowledge of extraneous verbiage. In this talk I will discuss
the way that Thomas Browne and some of his contemporaries
approached and answered science’s