Bethany Kidd (UK)

Since my undergraduate studies in English at Magdalen College, Oxford, my interests have been interdisciplinary, gravitating towards the activities of early scientists and how new ways of producing knowledge influenced literature. This interest developed from an enchanting visit to the University herbaria in 2017. As well as preserving exquisite, centuries-old plant specimens, the Sherardian herbarium preserves early attempts to establish a stable system of botanical nomenclature prior to Linnaean classification. The seventeenth-century chaos of 'synonymy'—the emergence of multiple names for the same species—threatened the relationship between language and nature. This relationship is also a fundamental concern of literature, and my third-year coursework examined how seventeenth-century poetry registered crises in botanical scholarship.

 

After graduating in 2018, and following a year working as a project assistant at Oxford University Press and a city tour guide, I went on to develop this research in my MSt in English (1550-1700) as an Ertegun Scholar, graduating with distinction in 2020. The central question of my masters thesis was this: how did early attempts to stabilise botanical nomenclature affect seventeenth-century readings of allegorical poetic landscapes, in which the misreading of 'nature' had a didactic literary purpose? How did Abraham Cowley (1618-1667), a student of botany and medicine as well as a poet, and John Evelyn (1620-1706), the early Royal Society's champion of gardening, read Edmund Spenser's epic poem, The Faerie Queene?