Todd Andrew Borlik, ed., Literature and Nature in the English Renaissance: An Ecocritical Anthology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. xxi + 602 pp. ISBN 9781316510155. £84.99 hardback.
Todd Andrew Borlik’s recent anthology Literature and Nature in the English Renaissance is a rich storehouse of just over six hundred pages that offers its readers an education in thinking ecocritically with authors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In making space alongside familiar poets and playwrights – the expected denizens of a literary anthology – for ‘farmers, philosophers, herbalists, sailors, bishops, heretics, surveyors, shepherds, entomologists, duchesses, Diggers, hunters, vegetarians, and demographers’ as well as ‘a motley herd of talking rivers, trees, satyrs, and other animals’ (3), Borlik brings together a compendium of agendas and knowledge-making practices that speaks to the intersection of ecology with ‘gender, class, religion, and region’ (3). The contributions of women are well represented, and selections from the works of lesser-known writers such as Thomasine Pendarves and Anne Kemp are given prominence alongside more familiar figures including Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson. When a sense of place is evoked, the focus of the collection is mainly on the work of English authors writing of the nooks and crannies of England, but European authorities on a range of topics are brought in via translations of their works into English. The inclusion of writings by John Derricke and Gerard Boate on the woods and bogs of Ireland extends the reach of the collection beyond English shores and offers a reminder of the environmental implications of colonial activity.
Opening his substantial introduction with the provocation that ‘conservationists have pronounced the United Kingdom to be one of the most “nature-depleted countries in the world”’ (1), Borlik signals the presentist, activist energy contained by the volume and makes a strong case for attending to early modern authors for the vital ‘biocultural audit’ (2) to which their writings give witness. There is, he writes, a ‘Janus-faced outlook’ to the anthology, which, while ‘tracing connections between past and present […] remains dedicated to illuminating – rather than disregarding, or greenwashing – the alterity of the Renaissance’ (8). The approach strikes a profitable balance, allowing for attention to be paid to literary concerns as well as to environmental histories that look beyond established myths, and offers a way into polyvocal critical conversations that speak to tradition and a particular historical moment, as well as to our own pressing contemporary issues. ‘Like ice core samples extracted from the heart of a glacier’, Borlik writes, ‘the entries in this collection decant the environmental conditions (and mental habits) of preceding centuries’ (8). As readers, we are invited to approach these specimens – temporarily held in stillness by the anthologising process – with openness and curiosity, and perhaps even in a self-consciously autoptic way; the richness and beauty of the collection invites meditative reading, but this is undercut by an urgency that results from what these testimonies may (or may not) have to say about our present.
In setting out a series of editorial principles for the ‘ecocritical editing of Renaissance texts’ (xviii-xxi), Borlik prepares the reader to notice to ‘the animating jolt’ attendant on the ‘liberal capitalization that prevailed during the Renaissance’ (xix) and the manner in which ‘the loose-jointed, rambling syntax of the Renaissance seems to emphasize the ecological principle of connectivity’ (xx). We are primed, then, to exercise a sharpened responsiveness to agency in its many forms. Indeed, Borlik prompts his readers to make connections between authors and to move dynamically between his editorially imposed categories, which while elegant and productive are also shown to be permeable and connected. ‘Part I: Cosmologies’, takes on the framing narratives of the macrocosm as mediated by classical and biblical authority and includes sections on ‘Creation and the State of Nature’ and ‘Natural Theologies’. ‘Part II: The Tangled Chain’ begins with reflections on ‘Hierarchy and the Human Animal’ before offering a taxonomical treatment of various animal, vegetable, and mineral entanglements. ‘Part III: Time and Place’ begins with a look at the seasons before moving through various sites that have long been dwelling places for the literary imagination. From representations of country houses and forests to those of lakes, rivers, and oceans, these entries stress-test the notion of writing place, owing to the range of genres, modes and approaches deployed: artificial landscapes and literary topoi meet the endeavours of surveyors and lawyers, on a spectrum that includes both material topographies and those of the mind.
‘Part IV: Interactions’ refracts the complex power dynamics spanning violence, protection and preservation that were inherent in a variety of habits and pastimes, from animal-baiting and hunting and hawking, to the keeping of domestic pets and household management. ‘Part V: Environmental Problems in Early Modern England’ surveys issues concerning population growth and industry, enclosure and deforestation, projects including fen-draining, and the relationship between pollution and life-expectancy. The problems raised by the writers in this section, as Borlik notes, strike us as familiar, or at least not unlike ‘a medley of alarmist headlines yanked from twenty-first-century media’ (21). The final section, ‘Part VI: Disaster and Resilience in the Little Ice Age’, looks to capture the specific tenor of the period being anthologised and as such pitches the lived and site-specific experiences of authors encountering the effects of an extreme period of climate variation alongside reflections on decay, mutability and resilience that draw on longer traditions and bodies of received knowledge. The volume also includes two sustained appendices, the first offering a timeline of ‘Industrialization and Environmental Legislation in the Early Anthropocene’ and the second a ‘Bibliography of Environmental Scholarship on the English Renaissance’, organised by thematic category in a similar manner to the main body of the work.
If one agenda of the anthology is to see the variety and polyvocality of writing from the period in its own terms, then, the other is to track the resonances it has with the concerns of our present. Indeed, the implications of impactful human activities and species losses are frequently brought into clear and devastating focus. In the conclusion to the editorial framing of Richard Brathwaite’s ‘The Lapwing’ (1621), for example, Borlik notes that lapwings are now ‘a “Red List” species’ (referring to the ‘Red List of Threatened Species’, established in 1964 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature; see https://www.iucnredlist.org/about/background-history). In the introduction to an extract concerning pest control from Thomas Hill’s The Gardener’s Labyrinth (1577), Borlik traces a narrative of crop protection that may begin with ‘sympathetic magic’ and an emerging science of ‘biological pest control’ but which, he notes, has ‘given way to synthetic pesticides like DDT’ (232), whose effects famously prompted Rachel Carson to write her 1962 exposé Silent Spring. The act of destroying a nest as depicted in Hester Pulter’s ‘The Lark’ (c.1655) is connected to the tensions that ‘exist today between farmers and conservationists in the UK, as autumn sowing and insecticide use are blamed for a 60 per cent drop in skylark numbers since the 1970s’ (153). Other writers are shown to pre-empt contemporary attitudes: the merchant and polymath Thomas Tryon, for example, is namechecked as ‘the first outspoken vegetarian in English history’ (379) and the mathematician and colonist Thomas Harriot is credited as drawing up ‘the first known calculations of the planet’s carrying capacity’ (395).
Saving self-contained and shorter pieces, works are typically extracted, often quite briefly, and it is clear that some ruthless editorial decisions concerning coverage had to be made. Nevertheless, the groundwork laid here would be of immense value to all researchers, teachers, and students with an interest in the complex interrelations of different kinds of life as understood by English writers of the Renaissance. The anthology would be an excellent resource for underpinning teaching, and its accessibility as an e-book (which would lend itself to further classroom anthologising and non-linear access) will be attractive to students at institutions with subscribing libraries. The vestiges of Borlik’s own teaching practice can be seen in the questions and provocations that operate within some of his framing commentaries and these offer valuable prompts for further discussion and analysis. His approach here is often diachronic and invites a responsiveness to multiple critical frames. In positioning the ‘outrageous anthropocentrism’ of George Herbert’s poem ‘Man’ (1633) alongside his poem ‘Providence’ (1633), for example, Borlik asks the reader to ponder whether the latter can ‘both endorse and subvert human exceptionalism’ (70). Or, in connection with John Donne’s An Anatomy of the World (1611), he asks, ‘Can environmentalists promoting eco-humility learn something from the spirituality of the early modern period?’ (547). Borlik also suggests comparative reading activities, drawing lines of connection, for example, between Margaret Cavendish’s poem ‘Similizing the Sea to Meadows and Pastures’ (1653) and the ‘oceanic pastoral’ of Edmund Spenser and Walter Ralegh (322). The underwater world of Thomas Heyrick’s ‘The Submarine Voyage’ (1691; see 323) is framed by evocations of the sounding imagination of William Shakespeare and connected back to ‘The Porpoise’ (c.1594-1600; see 160), a poem written by the Welsh poet and privateer Tomas Prys, which appears in the anthology in a modern translation. The questioning and cross-referencing approach does important work both in its immediate location and by resonating through a cumulative reading of the volume as a whole.
The writings of Edmund Spenser can be found contained within several thematic sections, reflecting Spenser’s range as a writer of various environmentally inflected modes, from pastoral to colonial propaganda. Like the rest of the anthology’s contents, his writings are lightly modernised and so appear a little unfamiliar to an eye accustomed to original spelling editions that also preserve typography and layout. The ‘huge sea monsters’ encountered during Guyon’s voyage to the Bower of Bliss in II.xii of The Faerie Queene are included in the fish section of ‘The Tangled Chain’ and Borlik charts how the passage ‘pivots from an enchanted medieval vision of the ocean towards the proto-scientific mentality of Protestant naturalists’ (158): a change of perspective that is instructive for the reading of other moments in Spenser’s longest work. The fable of ‘The Oak and the Briar’ that concludes The Shepheardes Calender’s February eclogue appears in the section dedicated to plant-life and offers, Borlik writes, a ‘fundamental lesson in ecology’, and a reminder that the work’s overall structure ‘mimics husbandry manuals and almanacs’ (177). The Faerie Queene is also drawn upon to illustrate pollution, where the depiction of Mammon’s Cave in II.iv is glossed as speaking to the period’s exploitation of mineral wealth through mining practices (467). The longest space devoted to Spenser is given over to his ‘Two Cantos of Mutabilitie’ (c.1598, published 1609) which appear in the section titled ‘Decay’ and wherein, as Borlik observes, ‘Mutabilitie’s claim to rule the entire universe betokens the advent of a post-equilibrium ecology’ (533): an observation that should jolt the reader into seeing Nature’s verdict anew.
While the anthology grants Spenser’s Mutabilitie a kind of victory, then, it is another of Spenser’s works – the poet’s youthful 1569 translation of a sonnet by Joachim du Bellay, ‘Then I beheld the fair Dodonian tree’ – that opens the final section, ‘Resilience’. Traces of Spenser also haunt earlier extracts: a reminder of the tangled ecological and intertextual relationships brought into the light via the anthologising process. In an interesting moment of reception, for example, the epithet ‘Fairy Talus’ – recalling the remorseless iron man of Spenser’s ‘Legend of Justice’ – is applied to a young whale mid-assault by harpooners by Edmund Waller in his mock epic, ‘The Battle of the Summer Islands’ (1645): ‘Like Fairy Talus with his iron flail,/ He threatens ruin with his ponderous tail’ (361). The act of reconfiguring the will of Spenser’s inhuman creation as the resolve of a hunted animal is telling of the ambivalence that characterises many of the anthology’s entanglements. Although Borlik chooses not to include Spenser’s writing about Ireland, Derricke’s Image of Ireland (1581) is shown to reveal a ‘troubling correspondence between colonial occupation and the destruction of biodiversity’ (136) that will be familiar to readers of A View (1633).
The volume as a whole affords much cause for delight when traditional critical categories and concepts are wittily brought into dialogue with the terms and vocabularies of ecological thinking. In a gloss to an episode of tree-carving taken from Mary Wroth’s Urania (1621), for example, Borlik comments on the ‘horticultural sprezzatura’ (281) of the artfully arranged landscape depicted. And as well as functioning as a storehouse of the ways in which ecological relations have been inflected by form, attitude, and genre, the anthology can be encountered at a very localised level as a storehouse of words that suggest a ‘physical intimacy with the environment’ (5), distinct to the lived experiences of the period. Evoking Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks (2015), Borlik argues for a salvaging of archaic terms: terms such ‘queachy’ (‘boggy’, 269), perhaps, or names that were once familiar and are now rare, like ‘ouzel’ (‘blackbird’, 278) and ‘mavis’ (‘thrush’, 562). It is a notion to which he returns in one of the volume’s final selections, in a moment that asks whether Michael Drayton’s ‘catalogues of creatures’, as found in both Poly-Olbion (888) and Noah’s Flood (1630), can ‘function like verbal arks’ (559). Literature, in this vision, is perhaps granted a recuperative capacity: one which can preserve at least a sense of the value of nature’s fecundity and variety. The last words of the literary collection are given to Michael Drayton, and to a mixed vision of catastrophe and resilience: ‘To make a new world, thus works everyone;/ The Deluge ceaseth and the old is gone’ (563).
Tamsin Badcoe
University of Bristol
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