Agricultural History Review, Volume 69 Part 2 (2021), p. 297

The field of ecocriticism in literary studies, which emerged into full flight around the turn of the present century, famously left the early modern period behind. Romanticism instead provided a bedrock, a moment of awakening to new perceptions of the relations between humans and the natural world. And it came with its own canon: John Clare, Dorothy Wordsworth, William Wordsworth, and so forth. This was convenient, since we already knew that these were people who wrote about nature; however, ecocriticism nonetheless provided a fresh and moderately useful theoretical frame, in accord with ethical concerns of the moment.

But the narrative of origin would have come as a surprise to Raymond Williams, whose seminal work of materialist criticism, The country and the city, stretched back into the Middle Ages. For that matter, it felt a little odd to me, as someone who lost my first supervisor (amicably, by the way, for this was England) by declaring to him that The country and the city was the best book on pastoral literature ever written. And then as someone who proceeded to read Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion, and other literature engaged with urgent early modern debates about rural and environmental change. And then as someone told by a colleague, in 2000, that I was an ecocritic, when I had never even heard the word before. In short, early modern ecocriticism has always been a green area fuzzed at the edges with grey, and I am here to testify to it.

But a thread of important studies has worked to break down preconceptions and add clarity to Renaissance ecocriticism. Indeed, one of the most energetic and rigorous participants in this process has been Todd Andrew Borlik, the editor now of Literature and Nature in the English Renaissance: An ecocritical anthology. His previous critical work has demonstrated at once the benefits of reading canonical literature in fresh ways, with ecocritical questions in mind, and the value of looking beyond the canon to uncover a wealth of different kinds of writing about the natural world. This sort of thing used to be seen by literary scholars as interdisciplinarity; now it is just what we do. This book could easily have been a collection of things Borlik had found in his previous research and tossed together, but it is far more than that. At 600 pages and including over 200 texts (or extracts of texts), it is a hugely impressive, ambitious, and capacious piece of research.

The book gathers material from across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The vast majority of selections are original writing in English, but he sensibly includes a handful of pieces that were translated and were influential in England at this time. The material is organized into six sections. The first, ‘cosmologies’, considers theories of creation that informed early modern thought, and writing concerned with the shaping hand of a Christian god in the natural world. The second, ‘the tangled chain’, responds to the idea of a great chain of being (so influential in Renaissance scholarship in the twentieth century), and includes selections of writing on humans, beasts, birds, fish, insects, plants, and metals and elements. The third, ‘time and place’, gathers material on seasons and key places of the early modern imagination: from the managed environments of gardens and estates, to forests, moors, mountains, rivers, and so forth. The fourth, ‘interactions’, covers human engagements with the animal world, from hunting and fishing, through pet keeping, to cooking and feasting. The fifth, ‘environmental problems in early modern England’, stretches from manifestations of agricultural and economic change (what its proponents might have called ‘improvement’, and what historians might still see as the beginning of an ‘agricultural revolution’) such as enclosure and the draining of the fens, as well as deforestation and pollution. And the sixth, ‘disaster and resilience in the Little Ice Age’, considers responses to extreme weather events.

This is a capacious collection of material, which offers much to historians as well as scholars of literature. It contains a strong thread of a literary canon: Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Ben Jonson, John Milton, Lucy Hutchinson, and so on. But it also contains, to take a few examples: selections from the Jacobean chorographer and surveyor John Norden, extracts capturing debates over enclosure, and a nice representation of religious thought. There are some rare gems, such as ‘The Pout’s Complaint’, a critique of fen-drainage in the voice of a fish, written by someone known only as Penny of Wisbech. And I count seven extracts from the work of Drayton, most notably his epic Poly-Olbion, which is manifestly a fine thing in an anthology.

Of course, there are gaps, and various readers will find fault. Some may be disappointed to see relatively little material concerned with agriculture, or the day-to-day business of living in the natural world for most people in early modern England. Others may have hoped for greater concern with the ways in which colonial plantations in Ireland and engagements with the New World altered perceptions of the relation between the English and nature. Others still may grumble that Borlik’s model of the ‘nation’ tends rather too consistently to be reduced to England. And literary historians may feel that the sub-sections on pastoral and georgic – the literary modes that helped lend shape to writing about the land, and have proved valuable (albeit perhaps overly so) in the study of such writing ever since – are somewhat perfunctory. But no anthology ever satisfied every reader; this is an impressive effort, and by far the best we now have. As Borlik writes in the valuable introduction: ‘By pitting Montaigne against Bacon, Descartes against Cavendish, Digby against Tryon,’ the book provides a ‘glimpse of the complex, messy and sometimes contradictory attitudes prevalent in the Long Renaissance: from curiosity to disgust, dominance to reverence’ (p. 16).

Like no publication before it, Literature and Nature in the English Renaissance makes sense of writing about the natural world in the pre-Romantic centuries, when so much was changing in the countryside and so many established truths were being exposed to scrutiny. It is a remarkable achievement, that will prove valuable for teaching and as a first route into research in this field.