The green world we call ours is in crisis. As we explore our own conflicted relationship to the natural world today, it seems opportune to revisit a period when this relationship was being reconfigured. In early modern Europe, Renaissance Humanism was unearthing texts by classical poets and philosophers who often had a much less anthropocentric view of the environment than that encoded in the Book of Genesis. Simultaneously, scientific innovations such as the telescope and the microscope were bringing the heavens and the flora and fauna of the earth into view in astonishing detail. This lecture series will explore how English playwrights and poets, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Margaret Cavendish, and John Milton responded to these new vistas. What happens when the story of Adam and Eve commanded by God to rule over the created world is read alongside Ovid’s Metamorphoses where trees and flowers have voices of their own? How might human supremacy be challenged when the ‘wonderful industrious minds of the little…Bees’ (Edward Topsell, The History of Four-Footed Beasts,1607) are taken seriously?
- Enseignant·e: Antoinina Bevan Zlatar