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Module Description
The mid-seventeenth century witnessed a revolution both in science and politics, and the idea of ‘nature’ was right at the centre of both. In this module, we will be looking at nature both as a philosophical idea, as a universal principle, as a set of laws, or as God’s handmaiden. We will be reading a broad range of genres, as well as studying visual material, such as emblems, paintings, and garden designs. We will be examining how ideas about nature are often inextricably bound up with questions about political power and control, gender relations, yet are at the same time expressive of a yearning for a lost Edenic state of innocence. At the same time, we will be discovering a range of avatars of modern-day discussions in the early modern debates on vegetarianism, animal souls, and animal rights.
Course outline week-by-week
Week I Creation Myths IPlato, Timaeus; Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s TimaeusPoems by Edmund Spenser; Thomas Traherne, and Andrew MarvelLobsien, Verena Olejniczak, Transparency and Dissimulation: Configurations of Neoplatonism in Early Modern English Literature (Berlin/ New York: De Gruyter, 2010) selections to be assigned.
Further readingEisenbichler, Konrad, Pugliese, Olga Zorzi, and Eisenbichler, K. Ficino and Renaissance Neoplatonism (Ottawa Print. University of Toronto Italian Studies ; 1993)Freeman, Louise Gilbert. "Vision, Metamorphosis, and the Poetics of Allegory in the "Mutabilitie Cantos"." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 45.1 (2005): 65-93.Wilberding, James., and Horn, Christoph, Neoplatonism and the Philosophy of Nature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012)
Week II Creation Myths II Genesis (KJV) , Ovid; Metamorphoses, Book I (LOEB edition)Milton, Paradise Lost, Book V; VI and VIIIMorgan, Luke. "Early Modern Edens: The Landscape and Language of Paradise." Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes 27.2 (2007): 142-48.Hiltner, Ken. Renaissance Ecology: Imagining Eden in Milton's England. (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne UP, 2008) selections to be assigned
Further ReadingMattison, Andrew, Milton's Uncertain Eden: Understanding Place in Paradise Lost. (New York/ London: Routledge, 2007)McColley, Diane Kelsey, Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell (London/New York: Routledge, 2007)Snyder, Susan, Pastoral Process : Spenser, Marvell, Milton (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP, 1998)
Week III Worlds of Travel and Experiment Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis
Debus, Allen G, Man and Nature in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1978) chs 5 & 6Hutchins, Zachary Mcleod. "Building Bensalem at Massachusetts Bay: Francis Bacon and the Wisdom of Eden in Early Modern New England." The New England Quarterly 83.4 (2010): 577-606. Web.
Further ReadingArmitage, David, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge UP, 2000)Dear, Peter Robert. Revolutionising the Sciences : European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500-1700. 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature : Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. HarperOne, 2019. Web.
Week IV Worlds of Travel and ExperimentSir Thomas Browne, ‘The Garden of Cyrus’; John Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation (1691)Killeen, Kevin., Forshaw, Peter J, The Word and the World : Biblical Exegesis and Early Modern Science (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) ch 1Preston, Claire. Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005). Ch. 6
Further ReadingBlair, Ann. The Theater of Nature : Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1997) Killeen, Kevin., Biblical Scholarship, Science and Politics in Early Modern England. Thomas Browne and the Thorny Place of Knowledge. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009).
Week V Living on the LandThe Georgic tradition and the Country HouseMarvel, ‘Upon Appleton House’; Aemilia Lanyer, ‘The Description of Cookham’, Ben Johnson, ‘To Penshurst.Fitter, Chris. Poetry, Space, Landscape: Toward a New Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995). Chs. 5 & 6
Further ReadingBending, Stephen., and McRae, Andrew, The Writing of Rural England, 1500-1800 (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)Low, Anthony, The Georgic Revolution (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton UP, 1985)
Week VI Living on the LandLevelling the LandWinstanley The Law of Freedom
Russ Leo, “Michel Foucault and Digger Biopolitics,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 58.1 (2018): 169-192.Moore, Jason W. "CAPITALISM AS WORLD-ECOLOGY: Braudel and Marx on Environmental History." Organization & Environment 16.4 (2003): 431-58.
Further ReadingHill, Christopher, The World Turned Upside down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975)Rogers, John. The Matter of Revolution : Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1996)
Week VII At the boundaries of the Human
John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
Schiesari, Juliana, Beasts and Beauties (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010) selections to be made availableHirsch, BD, and Haskell, Y, Lycanthropy in Early Modern England: The Case of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (Leiden: Brepols). Selections to be made available
Further ReadingEnenkel, K. A. E., Smith, P. J., Enenkel, Karl, and Smith, Paulus Johannes. Early Modern Zoology : The Construction of Animals in Science, Literature and the Visual Arts (Leiden: Brill, 2007)Raber, Karen, Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania, 2013)
Week VIII At the boundaries of the Human
Renaissance vegetarianism and the animal soulMargaret Cavendish, ‘Animal Intelligence; ‘The Hunting of the Hare’, and other poems.Muratori, Cecilia, The Animal Soul and the Human Mind: Renaissance Debates (Pisa: F. Serra, 2013.) selections to be made available
Further ReadingFudge, Erica, Renaissance Beasts : Of Animals, Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures. Urbana: U of Illinois, 200).Adamson, Peter, and Edwards, G. Fay. Animals. (Oxford: OUP, 2018)