Yasmine Haskell, auteur de Loyola’s Bees, Oxford University Press, 2004 . Entretien sur la poésie scientifique, objet du livre, depuis l’Antiquité, en particulier dans la poésie latine moderne.
«Were Jesuits conscious of creating their own ‘tradition’ in didactic poetry? Yasmin Haskell investigates…
The existence of hundreds of early modern didactic poems in Latin – poems teaching every conceivable branch of philosophical, scientific, social, and cultural knowledge – had intrigued me ever since I first read about the phenomenon in the introduction to James Naiden’s edition of Buchanan’s Sphaera, a sixteenth-century poem on astronomy. My doctoral thesis – written in Australia – dealt with the Italian Renaissance portion of this material, with poems that were relatively well known. It was only after I moved to Cambridge in 1995, and began exploring the libraries of England and Europe, that I had a presentiment of the untold treasures that lay submerged with the shipwreck of the Western didactic genre, a once proud vessel that had cruised the centuries from antiquity to Enlightenment, but had ultimately foundered on the rocks of Romanticism. »