Introductory description

Taught in Venice, this exciting interdisciplinary module (which combines perspectives from History of Art, History of Science and Medicine, Literary Studies, History of the Book, and more) explores the environmental humanities in early modern Europe, with a particular focus on Venice. It will discuss how early modern culture was shaped by constant ecological threats such as floods, land degradation, epidemic disease, resource depletion, overpopulation, and more. It will provide an advanced discussion of the Environmental and Blue Humanities as a field, enabling students to deploy these theoretical models in their own work and experience how they function via embedded case studies focussed on Venice and the Venetian context. Among other topics, we will explore the Republic’s artistic and intellectual prominence, its stylized urban design, and its geopolitical impact on the mainland and the Mediterranean, through the lens of its successes and failures in managing the natural world.

The module will seek to explore the implications for the humanities of work in ecocriticism and in environmental history, carving out new ways of attending to pre-modern Europe, and thinking together about how we can develop new ways to listen and to look for the enmeshed and multifaceted relationship between pre-modern culture and its multiple ecologies. We will also think about how ecocriticism and environmental history in the pre-modern period can inform our culture today, with the conviction that the humanities play just as vital a role as STEM in addressing our current juncture of climate crisis.

The module will balance intensive onsite teaching at the Warwick Venice Centre with place-based pedagogical site visits.

Students will be responsible for covering the costs of their travel, accommodation, and subsistence while in Venice. Students may also be required to pay a programme fee to cover the costs of the site visits. Although the course is open to all PGT students with relevant qualifications and understanding of the early modern period (subject to application), students on the PGT programmes in the Culture of the European Renaissance, Environmental Humanities, and Global Sustainable Development will be given priority.

Module web page

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.

Topics on the module will be determined by the most current state of the field and pedagogical approaches to the most appropriate place-based learning in Venice with a comparative approach between Venice and other early modern sites. As such, topics and site visits may change from year to year. Nevertheless, an indicative syllabus follows below:

1. Towards an Ecohumanist Approach to Early Modern Europe: Individuals and the Cosmos

2. Case Study: — Torcello - The Rise and Fall of a Medieval Commune

3. Urban Neighbourhoods and the Environment in Early Modern Venice and Beyond

4. Ecological Defenses, Food Systems, and the Strategic Use of the Waterways

5. Floods, Fires, Plagues, and other Early Modern Environmental Crises

6. Between Land and Sea: Ecological, Hydrogeographic, and Climate Knowledge in the Early Modern World

Learning outcomes

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

• Demonstrate a wide and deep knowledge of threats to the environment and ecology of pre-modern Venice, and how these shaped cultural responses and understandings
• Demonstrate advanced understanding of how the main discourses about the natural world in the pre-modern period relate to changing political, religious, environmental and social concerns
• Demonstrate detailed knowledge and advanced understanding of the environmental humanities as relates to cultural production in pre-modern Venice
• Critique, evaluate, and advance the current debates around pre-modern culture and the natural world
• Demonstrate advanced, detailed subject knowledge informed by recent research/scholarship and/or theory at the forefront of the environmental humanities

Indicative reading list

Extracts from Venice and the Anthropocene: An Ecocritical Guide. Eds. Cristina Baldacci, Shaul Bassi, Lucio De Capitani and Pietro Daniel Omodeo (2022).
Karl Appuhn, A Forest on the Sea. Environmental Expertise in Renaissance Venice (2009), 1-19.
Donatella Calabi, The Rialto, Venice’s Island Market. A Walk Through Art and History. (2022), 9-34.
Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, “Toward an Ecological understanding of the Myth of Venice,” in Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City State 1297-1797 eds. John Martin and Dennis Romano (2000), 40-64.
Ken Hiltner, What Else Is Pastoral? Renaissance Literature and the Environment (2011), 1-19.
Meital Shai and Simone Guseo, “Faith in Science Triumphant: An Eclipse in Villa Barbaro at Maser.” Artibus et Historiae 84 (2021), 195–220.
Sara Miglietti, “Between Nature and Culture: The Integrated Ecology of Renaissance Climate Theories.” In Early Modern Écologies. Eds. Pauline John Usher, Pauline Goul (2020), 137-60.
Pietor Daniel Omodeo, “The Invisible Fisherman: The Economy of Water Knowledge in Early Modern Venice.” Ichthyology in Context. Eds. Paul J. Smith and Florike Egmond (2023), 364-391.
James Pilgrim, “Jacopo Bassano and the Flood of Feltre.” The Art Bulletin 105 (2023), 115-137.

Also recommended:

Todd Borlik, “Renaissance Literature and the Environment” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. Oxford University Press, 2022.
Bryan Brazeau, “Take Me Down to the Paradise City: An Ecocritical Approach to Paradise Spaces in Italian Renaissance Epic,” Status Quaestionis 24 (2023): 21-45.
Giovanni Caniato, “Il controllo delle acque,” Storia di Venezia, VII, 479–508.
Gillen D'Arcy Wood, “Introduction: Eco-Historicism.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 8, No. 2, Climate and Crisis (2008), 1-7.
Gianfranco Pertot, Venice: Extraordinary Maintenance (2004).
Salvatore Settis, If Venice Dies (2015).
Anthony Tung, “Tourism versus the Habitable City,” from Preserving the World’s Great Cities (2001), 318-343.

Research element

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

Interdisciplinary

The module requires students to operate via an environmental humanities lens across early modern studies and beyond: in literature, history, religion, art history, urban planning, and forms of knowledge culture, religion, and politics, along with other fields.

International

The module features international case studies and international place-based learning in Venice as it is taught at the Warwick Venice Centre

Subject specific skills

• read closely and critically • analyse texts and discourses, and respond to the affective power of language and art, using appropriate approaches and terminology • develop independent and imaginative interpretations of literary, critical, linguistic, historical 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, especiallythrough constructive dialogue (for example, by listening, asking and responding to questions) • understand the role of narrative and emotion in decision-making • be sensitive to international cultural contexts when working with others. *develop intercultural competencies