The seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were among the worst years of the Little Ice Age. This volume attends to English texts from this period to trace associations between wintry physical landscapes and an icy inner landscape of human cruelty and tyranny whose rigors promote the ultimate chill of rigor mortis. Sailors seeking a polar route to the East brought terrifying reports of northern icescapes, long popularly linked with the devil. Simultaneously, concerns about increasingly cold winters at home in Britain overlapped with increased scrutiny of kingship and the church and fear of tyranny from both. Such fears were reflected in ongoing struggles between king and Parliament during the period, leading to revolution and war. The binding power of ice and the power of northern winters to deface, kill, and bury life suggested the Fall’s human parallel to winter: cold-hearted humans as tyrannical winters who deal in death.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword
- Introduction
- Part I At Home and Far from Home: Records of the Tyrant Cold
- 1. “Empress of the Northern Clime”: London in Winter
- 2. “Cold Chaos and Half-Eternal Night”: Overwintering Far North
- Part II Literature and the Lab: Imaginative and Experimental Explorations of Cold
- 3. Weathering the Fall in The Winter’s Tale
- 4. Milton and “Horror Chill”: Cold Within and Without
- 5. Nature’s Cold Left Hand: Boyle’s Experimental History of Cold, Begun
- 6. “Armed Winter and Inverted Day”: The Politics of Cold in Dryden and Purcell’s King Arthur
- 7. James Thomson and the Despot of Winter
- Coda
- Bibliography
- Index
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