Petrarch’s revival of the ancient practice of laureation in 1341 led to the laurel being conferred on poets throughout Europe in the later Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. Within the Holy Roman Empire, Maximilian I conferred the title of Imperial Poet Laureate especially frequently, and later it was bestowed with unbridled liberality by Counts Palatine and university rectors too. This handbook identifies more than 1300 poets laureated within the Empire and adjacent territories between 1355 and 1804, giving (wherever possible) a sketch of their lives, a list of their published works, and a note of relevant scholarly literature. The introduction and various indexes provide a detailed account of a now largely forgotten but once significant literary-sociological phenomenon and illuminate literary networks in the Early Modern period. A supplementary Volume 5 of Poets Laureate in the Holy Roman Empire. A Bio-bibliographical Handbook will be published in June 2019.

Physics and Literature is a unique collaboration between physicists, literary scholars, and philosophers, the first collection of essays to examine together how science and literature, beneath their practical differences, share core dimensions – forms of questioning, thinking, discovering and communicating insights.This book advances an in-depth exploration of relations between physics and literature from both perspectives. It turns around the tendency to discuss relations between literature and science in one-sided and polarizing ways. The collection is the result of the inaugural conference of ELINAS, the Erlangen Center for Literature and Natural Science, an initiative dedicated to building bridges between literary and scientific research. ELINAS revitalizes discussion of science-literature interconnections with new topics, ideas and angles, by organizing genuine dialogue among participants across disciplinary lines. The essays explore how scientific thought and practices are conditioned by narrative and genre, fiction, models and metaphors, and how science in turn feeds into the meaning-making of literary and philosophical texts. These interdisciplinary encounters enrich reflections on epistemology, cognition and aesthetics.