Early Modern Écologies is the first collective volume to offer perspectives on the relationship between contemporary ecological thought and early modern French literature. If Descartes spoke of humans as being "masters and possessors of Nature" in the seventeenth century, the writers taken up in this volume arguably demonstrated a more complex and urgent understanding of the human relationship to our shared planet. Opening up a rich archive of literary and non-literary texts produced by Montaigne and his contemporaries, this volume foregrounds not how ecocriticism renews our understanding of a literary corpus, but rather how that corpus causes us to re-think or to nuance contemporary eco-theory. The sparsely bilingual title (an acute accent on écologies) denotes the primary task at hand: to pluralize (i.e. de-Anglophone-ize) the Environmental Humanities. Featuring established and emerging scholars from Europe and the United States, Early Modern Écologies opens up new dialogues between eco-theorists such as Timothy Morton, Gilles Deleuze, and Bruno Latour and Montaigne, Ronsard, Du Bartas, and Olivier de Serres.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Pauline Goul and Phillip John Usher
- 1. Off the Human Track: Montaigne, Deleuze, and the Materialization of Philosophy
- Part 1: Dark(Ish) Ecologies
- 2. Du Bartas Responding to Morton’s Milton: A Bodily Route to the Ecological Thought
- 3. ‘When is a meadow not a meadow?’: Dark Ecology and Fields of Conflict in French Renaissance Poetry
- 4. Equipment for Living with Hyperobjects: Proverbs in Ronsard’s Franciade
- 5. Is Ecology Absurd? Diogenes and the End of Civilization
- Part 2: Nature’s Cultures
- 6. Between Nature and Culture: The Integrated Ecology of Renaissance Climate Theories
- 7. Almost Encountering Ronsard’s Rose
- 8. Renascent Nature in the Ruins: Joachim du Bellay’s Antiquitez de Rome
- Part 3: Groundings
- 9. An Inconvenient Bodin: Latour and the Treasure Seekers
- 10. Reading Olivier de Serres circa 1600: Between Economy and Ecology
- 11. Montaigne’s Plants in Movement
- Epilogue
- Index
- List of Illustrations
- Figure 1: Dissection of the abdomen. Source: Mercure Jollat, in: Charles Estienne, De Dissectione partium corporis (Paris: Simonem Colinaeum, 1545), p. 172. Image from Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF).
- Figure 2: Frontispiece from Olivier de Serres, Le Théâtre d’agriculture et mesnage des champs (Paris: Jamet Mettayer, 1600). Image from Houghton Library, Harvard University (Cambridge, MA).
- Figure 3: Diagram of the structure of the ‘Premier Lieu’ in Olivier de Serres, Le Théâtre d’agriculture et mesnage des champs, p. 15.
- Figure 4: Title page of the ‘Premier Lieu’, from Olivier de Serres, Le Théâtre d’agriculture et mesnage des champs, p. 16.
- Figure 5: Woodcut illustration at the head of the ‘Sixième Lieu’ in Olivier de Serres, Le Théâtre d’agriculture et mesnage des champs, p. 497.
- Figure 6: Hypothetical garden from the ‘Sixième Lieu’, from Olivier de Serres, Le Théâtre d’agriculture et mesnage des champs, pp. 604–605.
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