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Abstract
This article articulates the places of early modern poetry with contemporary eco-theories. Mobilising the connectivities of οικος rather than the separations of environment, the author traces ecological senses of place in the poetry of Du Bellay, Jacques Peletier, and Ronsard, and reclaims Renaissance humanism from posthumanist detractors. Humanist pastoral poetry manifests the sense of connection claimed as the purview of contemporary concepts such as naturecultures or transcorporeality. Renaissance place, as an ecological habit of thought, contrasts favourably with modern veneration of wilderness which separates human from environs. The conclusion suggests continuities between Renaissance humanism and our academic humanities inasmuch as they privilege relational, rather than acquisitive or extractive, value systems. The text is a modified version of the keynote address to the 2022 SEMFS Conference and contains references to some of the papers presented in the spirit of archiving that stimulating intellectual space.
Acknowledgements
When Katherine Ibbett invited me, on behalf of the Society for Early Modern French Studies, to address their annual conference on the theme of space and place, I hesitated. It had been a while since I had written or published on early modernity, or space and place, let alone both together, and I did not feel authorised to address a room full of scholars actively working on such questions. Katherine encouraged me to think of a keynote address as its own genre, allowing for a more ex-centric kind of approach than the traditional conference presentation of research in progress. Framed this way, the invitation was alluring, allowing me to fold in my current sense of distance from the field as a theme in its own right, and to (re)engage with early modern spaces – intellectual, textual, and physical – from a perspective that could be both personal and generalisable. I am immensely grateful to Katherine, and to the SEMFS, for drawing me back to so many places at once: the site of the conference in St Andrews, Scotland, not far from where I had grown up; the literary places of early modern France; and the professional space of early modern French studies more generally. The conference was not only a site of dynamic exchange, it was also exceptionally collegial, and I would like to thank all participants for creating a space of mutual human(ist) support. Thanks in particular to Noel Peacock, John O'Brien, Helena Taylor, Nick Hammond, and Emily Butterworth for their various forms of support for this visit and this work, and to Katherine Ibbett, again, and Andrea Frisch for friendly last-minute encouragement.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The following pages represent most of the content of the keynote address to the annual meeting of the Early Modern French Conference, Society for Early Modern French Studies, St Andrews, Scotland, 5–7 July 2022, with academic references added, and a few informal sections – which were more suited for oral delivery – removed. On occasion I reference other papers delivered at the conference, hoping to provide a partial commemoration of, and reflection on, the dynamic and inspiring exchanges that happened over those few days.
2 Richard Scholar’s presentation at this conference on the imaginative histories of utopias suggested the notion of ‘temporo-spatial play’ as a dynamic force which invents place, following the etymological sense of invention as discovery. This provides a helpful theoretical framing for my own questions here. R. Scholar, ‘Utopias and Temporo-Spatial Play’ (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Early Modern French Conference, Society for Early Modern French Studies, St Andrews, Scotland, July 5–7, 2022). All subsequent references to conference papers will be to this event, abbreviated as SEMFS Conference.
3 The OED defines ecology as ‘The branch of biology that deals with the relationships between living organisms and their environment. Also: the relationships themselves.’ Oxford English Dictionary, ‘Ecology’, <https://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/59380> [accessed September 26, 2022].
4 The influence of Bruno Latour’s thought will be apparent throughout. ‘Natureculture’, now widely used in the environmental humanities and social sciences, refers to an attempt to mediate between the dualisms of what Latour calls the modern constitution: nature and culture, human and animal/non-human, science and humanities. It is mobilised in, among others, B. Latour, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes : essai d’anthropologie symétrique (Paris: La Découverte, 1991); Latour, Politiques de la nature : comment faire entrer les sciences en démocratie (Paris: La Découverte, 1999); and D. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003).
5 T. Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 12.
6 M. de Certeau, L’invention du quotidien. 1. Arts de faire (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1990), p. 172.
7 John Lyons, in ‘Plain and Grotto: Parameters of the Baroque Garden’ (paper, SEMFS Conference, 2022), analysed the productive tensions between wild and tame, unbounded and regulated, in the space of the garden.
8 Jennifer Oliver, in ‘Spaces and Places of Ingenuity’ (paper, SEMFS Conference, 2022), presented mechanical inventions as sites of mastery over nature’s raw material.
9 For the idea of close reading as an ecological habit, see the collected chapters of P. J. Usher and P. Goul, eds., Early Modern Écologies: Beyond English Ecocritism (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020). All of the volume’s authors practise and model close reading as a way to encounter, or even simulate, material relations with the non-human, but see in particular the chapter by Usher, ‘Almost Encountering Ronsard’s Rose’, pp. 161–80.
10 C. Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), pp. xv–xvi.
11 P. J. Usher, ‘Untranslating the Anthropocene’, Diacritics 44.3 (2016), 56–76, pp. 62–3.
12 K. Goewens, ‘What Posthumanism Isn’t: On Humanism and Human Exceptionalism in the Renaissance’, in Renaissance Posthumanism, ed. by Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), pp. 37–63.
13 ‘Introduction’, in ibid., p. 3.
14 Jérôme Brillaud’s presentation at this conference demonstrated that culture and cultivation were intimately entwined in horticultural practice: ‘Growing Spaces: Vegetable Gardens in Early Modern France’ (paper, SEMFS Conference, 2022).
15 J. Du Bellay, Les Regrets et autres œuvres poétiques, ed. by Michael A. Screech and John W. Jolliffe (Geneva: Droz, 1979), p. 38. Subsequent citations of Du Bellay refer to this edition.
16 Readers who appreciate the relation between metrics and message will note the rhyme positions of the key words davantage, ménage, and héritage, the form mapping out the poem’s moral economy and ecology in ways to which critics such as Tom Conley have trained us to be attentive.
17 See T. Conley, ‘Reading Olivier de Serres circa 1600: Between Economy and Ecology’, in Early Modern Écologies: Beyond English Ecocritism, ed. by Phillip John Usher and Pauline Goul (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020), pp. 223–62. Conley argues that ‘the economy that goes with the concept and practice of mesnage has the tenor of a practical ecology’ (p. 263).
18 V. Nardizzi, ‘Remembering Premodern Environs’, in Object Oriented Environs, ed. by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Julian Yates (punctum books, 2016), pp. 179–84, 179.
19 Gabriel Egan argues that linked ordering in the Chain implies ‘tension in the model […] within each category there is thus a pull in two directions’, in ‘Gaia and the Great Chain of Being’, in Ecocritical Shakespeare, ed. by Lynne Bruckner (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 81–93, 60.
20 See L. Shannon, The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), whose analysis makes space for the unruly and violent in pre-Cartesian human–animal relations. See also J. Oliver, ‘“When is a meadow not a meadow?”: Dark Ecology and Fields of Conflict in French Renaissance Poetry’, in Early Modern Écologies, pp. 73–98; P. Goul, ‘Is Ecology Absurd? Diogenes and the Ends of Civilization’, in ibid., pp. 111–36, both of whom provide a corrective to any tendency we might have to idealise past ecologies.
21 Jacques Peletier du Mans, La Savoye (Annecy: Jacques Bertrand, 1572), accessible via the Bibliothèque nationale’s Gallica and the Bibliothèques virtuelles humanistes of the University of Tours. The most recent edition, also accessible on Gallica, is La Savoye : réimpression textuelle de l’édition de 1572. Notice sur la vie et les œuvres par Charles Pagès (Moutiers-Tarentaise, 1897). Subsequent references are to this edition. The authoritative recent study of Peletier’s work as a whole is S. Arnaud, La voix de la nature dans l’œuvre de Jacques Peletier du Mans (1517–1582) (Paris: Garnier, 2005), which centres his natural philosophy and also contains a wealth of bibliographic and biographic information.
22 Alexandra Corey’s conference paper analysed the ways in which textual landscapes carry the representational freight of Savoy’s political position: ‘Political Landscapes: On Descriptions of Nature in Emmanuel Philibert de Pignon’s Emmanuel Philibertus’ (paper, SEMFS Conference, 2022). For an overview of medieval and early modern Savoyard histories, see R. Brondy et al., La Savoie de l’an mil à la Réforme (Rennes: Ouest-France, 1982).
23 First published in Italy by the engraver-editor Paolo Forlani, Descrittione del ducato di Savoia (Venice, 1562).
24 Enquête Observatoire Agence Savoie Mont Blanc, ‘La fréquentation des sites, monuments et manifestations’, 7 September 2021, <https://pro.savoie-mont-blanc.com/Observatoire/Nos-donnees-brutes/Frequentation-des-sites> [accessed September 26, 2022].
25 Peletier, p. 118.
26 A. Leopold, ‘Thinking Like a Mountain’, in A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 129–33. Leopold argues that only by shifting perception away from individual humans (here, wolf hunters and cowherds) can ecological balance and species interdependence be preserved.
27 In their related critique of posthumanism, Morton explains that ecological thinking starts not with eliminating the human subject position, but rather defining it by its interactions with other beings: see for example The Ecological Thought (Harvard University Press, 2010).
28 W. Cronon, Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (London: Norton, 1996), pp. 69, 81.
29 O. de Serres, Le Theatre d’agriculture et mesnage des champs (Paris: Jamet-Métayer, 1600).
30 T. Borlik, Ecocriticism and Early Modern English Literature: Green Pastures (New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 43.
31 Clare Burgess’s conference paper on the urban geographies of sex workers surfaced very different kinds of voices from the archives: ‘Mapping Sex for Sale: A Geographical Approach to Understanding Sex Work in Late Sixteenth-Century Cities’ (paper, SEMFS Conference, 2022).
32 Peletier, pp. 100–01.
33 ibid., p. 83.
34 ibid., pp. 83–4.
35 Nardizzi, p. 182. Nardizzi is citing part of the OED definition here.
36 Philippe Borgeaud, in Recherches sur le dieu Pan (Rome: Institut Suisse, 1979), traces the links between Pan and panic – a sudden unexplained terror – insisting on the duality and ambiguity of both the god and Arcadia, a site of inhospitable wildness inhabited by half-civilised, half-savage natives.
37 Erwin Panofsky argues that the death of Pan represents the absorbing of the pagan by the Christian, a source of complex melancholy for Renaissance humanists mourning the loss of the classical world in all its wildness: see his Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (New York: Routledge, 1960), p. 113.
38 C. Gesner, Libellus de lacte et operibus lactariis (Zurich, 1541). An English translation of the prefatory letter by Dan Hooley is included in Dan Hooley’s chapter ‘Conrad Gessner: Letter to Jacob Vogel on the Admiration of Mountains (1541) and Description of Mount Fractus (1555)’, in Mountains and the German Mind: Translations from Gessner to Messner, 1541–2009, ed. by Sean Moore Ireton and Caroline Schaumann (Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2020), pp. 23–48.
39 Gessner, ‘On the Admiration of Mountains’, trans. by Hooley, in ibid., p. 30.
40 Hooley, in ibid., p. 28.
41 Peletier, p. 95.
42 ibid., p. 96.
43 Egan, p. 69.
44 Peletier, pp. 91, 98.
45 P. J. Usher, On the Exterranean – Extraction in the Humanist Anthropocene (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), p. 12.
46 Stacey Alaimo’s ‘transcorporeality’ seems particularly relevant to this troping of the suffering body of the mountain. Transcorporeality upends the idea of humans acting upon inert nature, substituting material inter- and intra-dependencies between bodies. The concept is operative in much of Alaimo’s work; see in particular Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).
47 W. Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (New York: Norton, 1938), p. 28.
48 Ovid is clear that the prelapsarian age lacked travel and displacement: ‘Not yet had the pine tree, felled on its native mountains, descended into the watery plain to visit other lands; men knew no shores except their own.’ Metamorphoses Book 1, trans. by Frank Miller (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), lines 94–6, p. 9.
49 Peletier, p. 99.
50 P. Alpers, What Is Pastoral? (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997).
51 K. Hiltner, What Else Is Pastoral? Renaissance Literature and the Environment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010).
52 This section contains paragraphs, some paraphrased, from material previously published, and I thank Amsterdam University Press for permission to republish from L. Mackenzie, ‘Epilogue’, in Early Modern Écologies, pp. 287–96.
53 See A. Grafton and L. Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1986).
54 The final panel of the conference consisted of two papers on intellectual and professional spaces, adding to the textual and geographic figurings of space/place in previous panels and reflecting our own conversations about professional spaces: H. Taylor, ‘Textual Spaces Versus Salon Spaces: The Case of Anne Dacier’, and L. Raynal, ‘Le cabinet au féminin : l’espace de travail des femmes professionnelles’, (papers, SEMFS Conference, 2022).
55 L. Mackenzie, The Poetry of Place: Lyric, Landscape, and Ideology in Renaissance France (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2010), pp. 121–45. My reading of Ronsard’s forest and Antoine de Baïf’s Bièvre river in this chapter identified the structuring conservative nostalgia in these landscapes; it is interesting to revisit and reinvest such conservatism from a perspective more explicitly engaged in ecological thought and disciplinary formation.
56 P. de Ronsard, ‘Elégie XXIV’ (1584), in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Jean Céard, Daniel Ménager, and Michel Simonin (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), vol. 2, pp. 408–09.
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Louisa Mackenzie
Louisa Mackenzie is Associate Professor of French at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA, and the author of The Poetry of Place: Landscape, Lyric and Ideology in Renaissance France (2012), as well as many articles and book chapters on early modern and contemporary ecocriticism and Animal Studies. Louisa’s article ‘The Fish and The Whale: Animal Symbiosis and Early Modern Posthumanism’ won the Sixteenth-Century Society’s prize for best article in 2014. Louisa is also co-editor with Stephanie Posthumus of French Thinking About Animals (2015), and co-editor with Vinay Swamy of Legitimizing ‘Iel’? (2019) and Devenir non-binaire en français contemporain (2022).