L'Astrée in the Twenty-First Century: Environment, Education, and Identity

This article explores how Honoré d'Urfé's pastoral novel L'Astrée (1607–27) is being used by residents of the region of France in which it is set as part of a plan for the sustainable development of their communities. I discuss interviews with local leaders and documentation describing these regional projects, in which environmental themes emerge as a way that twenty-first century readers can make meaning out of a seventeenth-century novel. In line with recent scholarship in the field of early modern French ecocriticism, I argue that these projects provide models for how to read and teach texts like L'Astrée.