Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity

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.

"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

• Foreword; M.O'Connor  & S.Mendelson   Introduction; J.Munroe & R.Laroche   PART I: RETHINKING THE FAMILIAR: THE WOMAN-NATURE CONNECTION Nature and the Difference 'She' Makes; L.Bruckner  First 'Mother of Science': Milton's Eve, Knowledge, and Nature; J.Munroe   Ecofeminist Eve: Illustrators Reading Milton's Heroine; W.Furman-Adams   PART II: RETHINKING THE 'ECOFEMINIST' IN EARLY MODERN DOMESTIC PRACTICE On the 'Oil of Swallows': Early Modern Women's Material Practice of Medicine and the Reliability of the Textual Record; M.DiMeo  & R.Laroche   Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Hannah Woolley's Material Politics; D.Goldstein  Preserving Nature: in Hannah Woolley's The Queen-Like Closet; or Rich Cabinet ; A.Tigner  PART III: RE-THINKING/RE-READING THE LANDSCAPE 'Goeing a broad to gather and worke the flowers': The Domestic Geography of Elizabeth Isham's Book of Remembrance ; H.Nunn  Grafting and Graffiti in Wroth's Urania ; M.Jacobson  & V.Nardizzi  Language 'like a thousand little stars on the trees and on the grass': Environmental inscription in Frances Brooke's The History of Emily Montague ;  E.Bowles   Afterword; R.Bushnell