Professor Sari Kivistö’s project studies the role of poetry and epideictic rhetoric in natural history at the early modern universities and at the Royal Academy of Turku (Åbo) in Finland.
The university context produced an enormous number of Latin dissertations and occasional poetry for dissertations and academic celebrations. The project explores how these dissertations and their threshold poems operated with the conventions of epideictic rhetoric and various cultural narratives and values.
The material has been very little studied, and the significance of poetry and epideictic rhetoric in the history of knowledge has not been properly assessed before. Rather than being empty ceremonial showcasing, academic threshold poems had multiple cultural, social and scholarly functions in addressing natural phenomena.
More generally, the project produces new information about early occasional poetry and the relationships between poetry, rhetoric, and nature in history.