Research Seminar Talk Dr Bethany Dubow --- (University of Oxford) Reading Nature's Alphabet: Early Modern Scientific Acrosticism

In the ‘Argument' to The Alchemist, Ben Jonson spells out the name of his play in the form of a twelve-line acrostic. Plotted across the vertical axis, the acrostic maps a totality; the microcosmic design of the play is articulated via each letter of its subject. John Donne and John Milton also used acrostics, including in passages of verse concerned with cosmology and creation. In this, the English poets drew on a tradition, classical in origin, that flourished at the intersection of mystical and natural philosophical poetics. The Hellenistic poet, Aratus, used an acrostic in his Phaenomena — an hexameter poem offering an account of the planetary bodies and constellations. More broadly, the link between the letters of the alphabet and the elements of creation has roots in the double-meaning of the Greek word stoicheion as both material ‘element' and alphabetical ‘letter'. In his cosmological dialogue, Timaeus, Plato recognises (though dismisses) this connection between verbal letter and material element.
Constellating these contexts, this paper is interested in how early modern ‘scientific' writers thought with the acrostic. Borrowing from poetic tradition, writers of ‘chemicall' and early modern natural philosophical literature deployed the acrostic as part of their cultivation of a practice of careful reading applicable to both alphabetic and elemental compositions. This practice, with its focus on the reduction of concrete objects (words) to their elements (letters), could support — both on the page and in the ‘book of nature' — the deciphering of hidden relations and making of new combinations.
This paper takes seriously the early modern acrostic, arguing for its implication in a classically informed, yet increasingly ‘new' scientific, poetics of discernment and experiment.