La poésie des désastres entre science et religion : la culture encyclopédique du baroque méridional

Abstract

This article focuses on the reception of natural disasters in Baroque lyric poetry and aims to show the proximity between prose and verse in Southern Italy’s literary output. Through the analysis of three poems from the second half of the 17th century and their comparison with a scientific “discourse” by Tommaso Cornelio –on a solar eclipse in 1652–, it is possible to reveal not only similarities in the narrative structure of these texts, but also the use of the same images and the same lexicon. This study, which allows us to delve further into the relationship between science and poetry during the 17th century, outlines a poetic product that was very widespread in the Spanish Viceroyalty of Naples: the poetry of disaster. The demonstration also underlines that the poetry of disasters is the fruit of Neapolitan scientifical knowledge, as well as the particular product of a territory frequently struck by natural disasters.

Keywords

• lyric poetry
• science
• Baroque
• eclipse
• metaphor