Early Modern Ecostudies: From the Florentine Codex to Shakespeare (review)

This new collection in the growing field of early modern ecocriticism offers some local pleasures, but its real contribution lies in a few searching essays, the most powerful of which implicitly raise significant methodological concerns for the field, concerns applicable to most of the volume's essays. The collection's editors emphasize the range of the book's fifteen essays, which they divide into three sections: essays investigating "the implications of an ecocritical approach for both the scholarship and the politics of historical literary criticism" (3); essays on the environmental content of religious texts and practices; and essays rereading colonial texts and landscapes for their significance for early modern and contemporary ecocriticism. While these rubrics certainly point toward the volume's chief interests, the divisions are partly notional: all three sections contain essays oriented toward methodological and/or disciplinary reflection and essays on colonial texts.

Each section yields essays offering interesting objects of study and engaging analysis expanding our knowledge of period attitudes toward the living natural world. Following ecocritical trends of mining literature for other modes of relation to nature besides the current realities of destruction and consumption, many essays highlight appealing stances or ethics of the past. For instance, in an essay on the environmental ethics of the experimental religious community at Little Gidding, Nicholas Johnson describes a philosophy of "ecological reciprocity" (157) and "ecological justness" (146) registered in the startling visual appositions of engravings of insects, animals, and human figures in a "bible harmony" (145)-a verbal and visual collage and collation of the gospel narrative-produced at Little Gidding. Johnson shows that the Little Gidding harmony attributes unique capabilities to animals, including their own instructive forms of relation to the divine.

Other chapters contribute to a genealogy of our contemporary situation by documenting more strained relationships between human beings and their environments. Millie Gimmel tracks Bernardino de Sahagún's conflicting impulses to "save and destroy native culture" (171) in the Nahuatl-Spanish "universal history" (169) he compiled in the Florentine Codex. (Gimmel's is one of several welcome chapters that expand the volume's content beyond largely English and Anglophone contexts.) A smart essay by Karen Raber, "How to Do Things with Animals," theorizes that the relative absence of cats from recent early modern animal studies may reflect not only the cat's elusiveness, neither fully domesticated nor feral, but also human discomfort at the cat's mirroring of our own capacity for playful cruelty, which in turn suggests difficulties for theorizing a utopian post-humanity. Raber notes the problematic critical desire to exculpate human enormities by recovering the voices of other species; in the striking absence of early modern references to purring, she finds limits to our efforts fully to understand both a past culture and its animals themselves through such attempts.

These local studies are useful, but Early Modern Ecostudies's most important and exciting essays engage questions about the moral purpose and practical impact of early modern ecocriticism and ecocriticism more generally. Four of these raise serious objections to the volume's more topical essays, offering new models and problems for further work.

Critics and activists long attentive to environmental issues may begrudge belatedness in the turn to ecocriticism in other fields and be suspicious of the rationales for methodological fusion. So long as early modernists are merely capitalizing on the latest trend or, more sympathetically, just seeking to explore an exciting and productive new lens of analysis, their entrée into the field may be only rhetorically indebted to ecocriticism's moral project and philosophical commitments. Such a concern is most plaintively voiced by Simon C. Estok in "Doing Ecocriticism with Shakespeare." Estok approaches the methodological alliance between early modern literary historicism and ecocriticism with enormous skepticism. He insists that early modern ecocriticism must be directed at "radical activist possibilities" (77), adopting multiple activist theories and going beyond thematic analysis...