Introductory description

This module will investigate the relationship between man and the natural world in early modern England. We will read scientific and theoretical writings, art, poetry, prose and drama from the period 1509-1727 to see how people thought about, and with, the natural world. We will critically analyse a variety of texts organised into three sections -- Animal, Vegetable and Mineral -- to trace changing attitudes in which we can ascertain both the origins of vegetarianism and sustainable living, and of human exploitation of natural resources.

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Week 1, Introduction, Themes and Theories: *Abraham Fleming, Preface to his translation of John Caius, Of English Dogs (1576); John Milton, Book 4 of Paradise Lost; Ken Hiltner, 'Early Modern Ecology' (2010); extract from Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World (1983); extract from Simon C. Estok, Ecocriticism and Shakespeare (2011).
ANIMAL
Week 2, Dogs: *Edward Topsell, 'Dogs' in A History of Four-footed Beasts (1607); Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1594) and John Gay, 'An Elegy on a Lapdog' (1720).
Week 3, Aesop: Selected Tales and Illustrations from *William Caxton's Aesop (1484), *John Ogilby's Fables (1651) and *John Gay's Complete Fables (1727)
VEGETABLE
Week 4, Pastoral: Shakespeare, As You Like It (1601) and extracts from Pastoral Poetry of the English Renaissance, ed. Sukanta Chauduri (2016)
Week 5, Trees: *Ben Jonson, 'The Forest' (1616), John Denham, 'On Cooper's Hill' (1642), Alexander Pope, Windsor Forest (1713) and extracts from *John Evelyn, Silva (1662)
Week 6, Parks and Gardens: Francis Bacon 'Of Gardens'; Andrew Marvell, selection from Poems; Edmund Waller, 'On St James' Park' (1661) and Rochester, 'A Ramble in St James' Park' (c. 1672-3)
MINERAL
Week 7, Water: John Leland, 'On the Hot Springs of Britain' (c. 1533), trans. and intro. A. W. Taylor in An Anthology of British Neo-Latin Literature (2020); Thomas Shadwell, Epsom Wells (1672); extracts from *Ellis Prat, A Short Treatise of Metal & Mineral Waters (1684); extracts from *Anthony Walker, Fax Fonte Accensa, Fire Out of Water; or An endeavour to kindle devotion from the consideration of the fountains God hath made (1684).
Week 8, Coal: *Anon., Sea-Coale, Char-Coale, and Small-Coale: A Dialogue (1643); and extracts from *John Evelyn, Fumifugium (1661) and Shadwell, Epsom Wells (1672) from last week
Week 9, Storms 1 (Weather): Shakespeare, Macbeth (1606) and Shakespeare, King Lear (1606)
Week 10, Storms 2 (Dominion and Empire): Francis Bacon, 'Of Plantation', Shakespeare, The Tempest (1611), extracts from *Ralph Bohun, A Discovery of Winds (1671) and storm paintings of the 17th Century by e.g. Rembrandt, Van de Velde the Younger

• indicates a text to be accessed via Early English Books Online

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate a wide and deep knowledge of primary texts written in the period 1509-1727 which engage with the natural world
• Demonstrate detailed knowledge and advanced understanding of the major ecological questions of the period 1509-1727
• Demonstrate advanced understanding of how the main discourses about the natural world in the period 1509-1727 relate to changing political, religious and social concerns
• Demonstrate detailed knowledge and advanced understanding of ecocriticism as it relates to literature written between 1509-1727
• Critique, evaluate and advance the current debates around early modern literature and the natural world
• Demonstrate advanced, detailed subject knowledge informed by recent research/scholarship at the forefront of the discipline
• Evaluate the uncertainty, ambiguity and limitations of knowledge in the discipline

Indicative reading list

Primary Texts
Most readily accessed from Early English Books Online via Warwick University Library website:
Anon. Sea-Coale, Char-Coale, and Small-Coale: A Dialogue (1643)
Bohun, Ralph. A Discovery of Winds (1671).
Caius, John. Of English Dogs, trans. Abraham Fleming (1576)
Caxton, William. Aesop (1484)
Evelyn, John. Fumifugium (1661)
Evelyn, John. Silva (1662)
Jonson, Ben. 'The Forest' (1616)
Ogilby, John. Fables (1651)
Prat, Ellis. A Short Treatise of Metal and Mineral Waters (1684)
Shadwell, Thomas. Epsom Wells (1672)
Topsell, Edward. 'Dogs' in A History of Four-footed Beasts (1607)
Walker, Anthony. Fax Fonte Accensa, Fire Out of Water (1684)

In scholarly editions
~ available online via Warwick University Library
Bacon, Francis. The Essays, ed. John Pitcher. Penguin, 1985. Kindle edition (£0.49).
Chauduri, Sukanta (ed.). Pastoral Poetry of the English Renaissance. Manchester University Press, 2016 ~
Gay, John. John Gay: Poetry and Prose (vol. 2), ed. Vinton A. Dearing. Oxford University Press, 1975; online 2014 ~
Leland, John. 'On the Hot Springs of Britain' (c. 1533), trans. and intro. A. W. Taylor in An Anthology of British Neo-Latin Literature, ed. Gesine Manuwald, L. B. T. Houghton and Lucy R. Nicholas. Bloomsbury, 2020.
Marvell, Andrew. The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno, Penguin, 2005
Milton, John. Paradise Lost (Book 4), ed. Alastair Fowler. Longman Annotated Poets. Pearson Education, 2006
Pope, Alexander. ‘Windsor Forest’ in The Poems of Alexander Pope: Volume 1, ed. Paul Baines and Julian Ferraro. Longman Annotated Poets. Pearson Education, 2019
Rembrandt https://www.gardnermuseum.org/experience/collection/10953?filter=artist%3A3151
Rudrum, Alan, Joseph Black and Hollie Faith Nelson (eds). The Broadview Anthology of Seventeenth Century Verse and Prose (contains poems by Denham, Waller, Rochester, et al.), 2000
Shakespeare, William. As You Like It, ed. Leah S. Marcus. Norton Critical Editions, 2011
Shakespeare, William. King Lear, ed. Grace Ioppolo. Norton Critical Editions, 2008
Shakespeare, William. Macbeth, ed. Robert S. Miola. Norton Critical Edition, 2013
Shakespeare, William. The Tempest, eds Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman, Norton Critical Editions, 2019
Shakespeare, William. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, ed. Roger Warren. The Oxford Shakespeare, 2008.
Van de Velde, Willem (the Younger) https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/willem-van-de-velde

Secondary Material
Acheson, Katherine. ‘Gesner, Topsell, and the Purposes of Pictures in Early Modern Natural Histories’, Printed Images in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Interpretation, ed. Michael Hunter. Ashgate, 2010.
Acheson, Katherine. ‘The Picture of Nature: Seventeenth-Century English Aesop's Fables’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 9:2 (2009): 25-50. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20798268. ~
Burt, Richard and John Archer (eds). Enclosure Acts : Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England. Cornell University Press, 1994. ~
Cavert, William M. The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City. Cambridge University Press, 2011. ~
Chauduri, Sukhanta. Renaissance Pastoral and its English Developments. Oxford University Press, 1989.
Clark, Stuart. ‘King James’ Daemonologie: Witchcraft and Kingship’ in The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft, ed. Sidney Anglo. Routledge, 1977, 156-81.
Estok, Simon C. Ecocriticism and Shakespeare. Palgrave, 2011 ~
Fagan, Brian. The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850. Basic Books, 2002; rev. ed. 2019 ~
Fowler, Alastair. ‘Country House Poems: the Politics of a Genre’. The Seventeenth Century, 1:1 (1986), 1-14, DOI: 10.1080/0268117X.1986.10555247 ~
Gaard, Greta. Critical Ecofeminism. Lexington Books, 2017 ~
Hiltner, Ken. 'Early Modern Ecology' in A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway. Blackwells, 2010 ~
Hiltner, Ken. What Else is Pastoral? Cornell University Press, 2011 ~
Hodnett, Edward. Aesop in England: The Transmission of Motifs in Seventeenth-Century Illustrations of Aesop’s Fables. University of Virginia Press, 1979.
Jenner, M. ‘The Politics of London Air: John Evelyn's Fumifugium and the Restoration’. The Historical Journal, 38:3 (1995), 535-551 doi:10.1017/S0018246X00019968 ~
Jones, Gwilym. Shakespeare’s Storms. Manchester University Press, 2016 ~
Kamps, Ivo, Karen L. Raber and Thomas Hallock (eds). Early Modern Ecostudies. Palgrave, 2008~
Lawrence, Henry W. City Trees: A Historical Geography from the Renaissance through the Nineteenth Century. University of Virginia Press, 2008.
Lewis, Jayne Elizabeth. The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, 1651-1740, Cambridge University Press, 1996. ~
Manning, Roger B. Hunters and Poachers. Oxford, 1993.
Merchant, Caroline. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. Harper-Collins, 1980.
Oster, Emily. ‘Witchcraft, Weather and Economic Growth in Renaissance Europe’, JEP 18.1 (Winter 2004), 215-28.
Patterson, Annabel. Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History. Duke University Press, 1991.
Pfister, Christian. “Climatic Extremes, Recurrent Crises and Witch Hunts: Strategies of European Societies in Coping with Exogenous Shocks in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries.” The Medieval History Journal 10, no. 1–2 (October 2006): 33–73. https://doi.org/10.1177/097194580701000202
Pointing, Clive. A New Green History of the World. Vintage Books, 2007.
Raber, Karen. ‘Recent Ecocritical Studies of English Renaissance Literature’, ELR 37:1 (Feb 2007), 151-171. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6757.2007.00097.x
Roberts, Jeanne Addison. The Shakespearean Wild. University of Nebraska Press, 1991.
Theis, Jeffrey S. Writing the Forest in Early Modern England. Duquesne University Press, 2009.
Thirsk, Jean (ed.). The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Vol. 4, 1500-1640, gen. ed. H. P. R. Finberg. Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World. Penguin, 1983
Verdú, C. “‘Me thinks I see the love that shall be made’: two Restoration views of St James Park”, 2017. https://open.conted.ox.ac.uk/resources/documents/%E2%80%98me-thinks-i-see-love-shall-be-made%E2%80%99-two-restoration-views-st-james-park
Watson, Robert N. Back to Nature: the Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance. Penn University Press, 2006
Wilson, Richard. “Like the old Robin Hood”: As You Like It and the Enclosure Riots, Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 43, Issue 1, Spring 1992, Pages 1–19, https://doi.org/10.2307/2870900

Research element

The assessments will require students to do significant independent research at an advanced level

Interdisciplinary

The module requires students to operate across early modern studies: in literature, history, religion and art history. Students can choose to focus on one or two of these disciplines for the assessment.

Subject specific skills

• read closely and critically
• analyse texts and discourses, and respond to the affective power of language,
  using appropriate approaches and terminology
• develop independent and imaginative interpretations of literary, critical, linguistic or
  creative material
• articulate a critical understanding of complex texts and ideas (and of their historical
  relations where appropriate)
• write clearly, accurately and effectively
• apply scholarly bibliographic skills appropriate to the subject

Transferable skills

• discover and synthesize complex information and diverse evidence
• respond creatively and imaginatively to research tasks
• initiate projects of their own
• present information within wider contexts
• test, interpret and analyse information and evidence independently and critically,
  producing from that analysis cogent arguments and decisive judgements
• plan, organise and report to deadline.
• articulate their own and other people's ideas concisely, accurately and persuasively
  both orally and in writing
• develop working relationships with others in teams, especially through constructive
  dialogue (for example, by listening, asking and responding to questions)
• understand the role of narrative and emotion in decision-making
• be sensitive to cultural contexts when working with others.