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  3. Environmental Humanities in Pre-modern Cultures

This series in environmental humanities offers approaches to medieval, early modern, and global pre-industrial cultures from interdisciplinary environmental perspectives. We invite submissions (both monographs and edited collections) in the fields of ecocriticism, specifically ecofeminism and new ecocritical analyses of under-represented literatures; queer ecologies; posthumanism; waste studies; environmental history; environmental archaeology; animal studies and zooarchaeology; landscape studies; ‘blue humanities’, and studies of environmental/natural disasters and change and their effects on pre-modern cultures.

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4 results in Environmental Humanities in Pre-modern Cultures

Water and Cognition in Early Modern English Literature
  • Edited by Nicholas Helms, Steve Mentz
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    16 April 2024
    Print publication:
    14 March 2024
  • Water and cognition seem unrelated things, the one a physical environment and the other an intellectual process. The essays in this book show how bringing these two modes together revitalizes our understanding of both. Water and especially oceanic spaces have been central to recent trends in the environmental humanities and premodern ecocriticism. Cognition, including ideas about the 'extended mind' and distributed cognition, has also been important in early modern literary and cultural studies over the past few decades. This book aims to think 'water' and 'cognition' as distinct critical modes and also to combine them in what we term 'watery thinking'. Water and Cognition brings together cognitive science and ecocriticism to ask how the environment influences how humans think, and how they think about thinking. The collection explores how water - as element, as environment, and as part of our bodies - affects the way early modern and contemporary discourses understand cognition.

Shakespeare's Botanical Imagination
  • Edited by Susan C. Staub
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    17 October 2023
    Print publication:
    07 March 2023
  • Writing on the cusp of modern botany and during the heyday of English herbals and garden manuals, Shakespeare references at least 180 plants in his works and makes countless allusions to horticultural and botanical practices. Shakespeare's Botanical Imagination moves plants to the foreground of analysis and brings together some of the rich and innovative ways that scholars are expanding the discussion of plants and botany in Shakespeare's writings. The essays gathered here all emphasize the interdependence and entanglement of plants with humans and human life, whether culturally, socially, or materially, and vividly illustrate the fundamental role plants play in human identity. As they attend to the affinities and shared materiality between plants and humans in Shakespeare's works, these essays complicate the comfortable Aristotelian hierarchy of human-animal-plant. And as they do, they often challenge the privileged position of humans in relation to non-human life.

The Environmental Legacy of War on the Hungarian-Ottoman Frontier, c. 1540-1690
  • András Vadas
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    17 October 2023
    Print publication:
    27 February 2023
  • This book is the first monographic attempt to follow the environmental changes that took place in the frontier zone of the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary in the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries. On the one hand, it looks at how the Ottoman-Hungarian wars affected the landscapes of the Carpathian Basin - specifically, the frontier zone. On the other hand, it examines how the environment was used in the military tactics of the opposing realms. By taking into consideration both perspectives, this book intends to pursue the dynamic interplay between war, environment, and local society in the early modern period.

The Eco-Self in Early Modern English Literature
  • Elizabeth Gruber
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    15 October 2023
    Print publication:
    07 March 2023
  • The Eco-Self in Early Modern English Literature tracks an important shift in early modern conceptions of selfhood, arguing that the period hosted the birth of a new subset of the human, the eco-self, which melds a deeply introspective turn with an abiding sense of humans' embedment in the world. A confluence of cultural factors produced the relevant changes. Of paramount significance was the rapid spread of literacy in England and across Europe: reading transformed the relationship between self and world, retooled moral reasoning, and even altered human anatomy. This book pursues the salutary possibilities, including the ecological benefits, of this redesigned self by advancing fresh readings of texts by William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, John Webster, and Margaret Cavendish. The eco-self offers certain refinements to ecological theory by renewing appreciation for the rational, deliberative functions that distinguish humans from other species.