Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvii

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2. Introduction: In Dialogue with Nature: New Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity

   1. Introduction: In Dialogue with Nature: New Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity

      • Jennifer Munroe, Rebecca Laroche

      Pages 1-11

3. Rethinking the Familiar: The Woman-Nature Connection

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 13-13

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   2. N/nature and the Difference “She” Makes

      • Lynne Dickson Bruckner

      Pages 15-35

   3. First “Mother of Science”: Milton’s Eve, Knowledge, and Nature

      • Jennifer Munroe

      Pages 37-54

   4. Ecofeminist Eve: Artists Reading Milton’s Heroine

      • Wendy Furman-Adams, Virginia James Tufte

      Pages 55-83

4. Rethinking Early Modern Domestic Practice

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 85-85

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   2. On Elizabeth Isham’s “Oil of Swallows”: Animal Slaughter and Early Modern Women’s Medical Recipes

      • Michelle DiMeo, Rebecca Laroche

      Pages 87-104

   3. Woolley’s Mouse: Early Modern Recipe Books and the Uses of Nature

      • David Goldstein

      Pages 105-127

   4. Preserving Nature in Hannah Woolley’s The Queen-Like Closet; or Rich Cabinet

      • Amy L. Tigner

      Pages 129-149

5. Rethinking the Landscape

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 151-151

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   2. “Goeing a broad to gather and worke the flowers”: The Domestic Geography of Elizabeth Isham’s My Booke of Rememberance

      • Hillary M. Nunn

      Pages 153-174

   3. The Secrets of Grafting in Wroth’s Urania

      • Vin Nardizzi, Miriam Jacobson

      Pages 175-194

   4. Language “like a thousand little stars on the trees and on the grass”: Environmental inscription in Frances Brooke’s The History of Emily Montague

      • Emily Bowles

      Pages 195-210

   5. Afterword

      • Rebecca Bushnell

      Pages 211-217

6. Back Matter

   Pages 219-241

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Challenges the notion of how early modern women may or may not have spoken for (or even with) nature. By focusing on various forms of 'dialogue,' these essays shift our interest away from speaking and toward listening, to illuminate ways that early modern Englishwomen interacted with their natural surroundings.

• dialogue
• Early Modern English
• English
• environment
• essay
• France
• history
• history of literature
• knowledge
• landscape
• medicine
• nature
• stars
• women

"This is an important collection.The editors make a powerful case for the centrality of a revised ecofeminism to both feminist and ecocritical scholarship. And in support of their project, they have assembled a first-rate collection of original essays that are grounded in meticulous historical research and subtle textual analysis and informed by mindful attention to present experience and its political implications." - Phyllis Rackin, professor emerita of English, University of Pennsylvania

"Expands and updates an essential field within environmental scholarship. Moving beyond ideological abstractions, it pays illuminating attention to the particularities of life, especially women s lives." - Robert N. Watson, Distinguished Professor of English, UCLA and author of Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance

"[This book] is at once an homage to Sylvia Bowerbank's Speaking for Nature and a passionately engaged critique of prevailing assumptions about ecocriticism, feminism, and language. The provocative and innovative essays gathered herereframe current understandings about the nature of women's participation in early modern culture and probe the relationship between the natural world and the man-made power relations of early modern England. This collection also packs a punch in its trenchant readings of early modern texts ranging from Paradise Lost to women's diaries and recipe books. The book's message is powerfully urgent and immediately relevant tothe most pressing concerns of our own time." - Dympna C. Callaghan, William Safire Professor of Modern Letters, Syracuse University

JENNIFER MUNROE Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA.
REBECCA LAROCHE Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, USA.

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