The Outrageous Inner Lives of Plants: Abortion Poetics in Abraham Cowley’s Plantarum Libri Duo (Two Books of Plants)

Abraham Cowley’s expansive Latin poem, Plantarum Libri Duo (1662) is one of the most elusive ‘scientific poems’ of an era that sought in such writing not to replicate what prose could say on the matter, and still less to serve any didactic or explanatory purpose. The poem, translated as ‘Of Plants’ (1689), includes in its lengthy second book, an animated debate on gynaecology, menstruation and abortion, all considered by and from the perspective of the plants involved: a collection of abortifacients and emmenagogues. It is at one and the same time, borderline absurd and wholly serious, even while, in tone, it is a long way from the burlesque so commonly encountered in the era’s poetry.  On the contrary, its account of the always fraught medical, social and emotional tensions around abortion make it the most frank and sympathetic discussions of the subject in early modernity. This paper looks at what, until recently, was a wholly neglected work and asks how Cowley understands the tasks and parameters of a poem that enmeshes its scientific subject matter within such rhetorical, dramatic and generic complexity.