This important volume extends the horizons of undertakings like French Ecocriticism (2017). Stirred by Louisa Mackenzie's remarks during “Ecocritical Approaches to the French Renaissance” (MLA 2015), Goul and Usher's compendium highlights how early modern French culture can enrich ecocriticism. What if authors like Michel de Montaigne and Pierre de Ronsard—widely referenced here—were keystones for Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour, or Timothy Morton? There is a heartening blend of practices in “the book as a whole [that] speaks, intentionally, with an accent” (11), without neglecting translations into English. Sections on “Dark(ish) Ecologies,” “Nature's Cultures,” and “Groundings” demonstrate that, in the words of Mackenzie's epilogue, “think[ing] ecologically in early modern France is to think through an ethos of life itself, about how humans inhabit, manage, and relate to . . . their dwelling places: how they live with and in” (289).
Hassan Melehy's rumination on Montaigne, Gilles Deleuze, and the materialization of philosophy heeds the agentic qualities of sixteenth-century ecological awareness: “allowing Montaigne's writings to communicate with the present involves a . . . disposition that sets aside triumphalist attitudes toward the past, . . . part of learning the humility necessary for respecting the many lives of matter” (44). As opposed to Morton's recourse to John Milton regarding ecological thinking, Stephanie Shiflett proffers Guillaume du Bartas, who considered “the same elements that make up stars and trees and cuttlefish [to] make up the human body. Thus . . . all beings, living and non-living, have a base language in common” (69). A protean ecopoetics meshing human and more-than-human emerges in Jennifer Oliver's exploration of fields of conflict in verse by Ronsard and Agrippa d'Aubigné through dark ecology, with “‘background scenery’, the aesthetic wallpaper that has come to seem ‘given’ or even banal through familiarity . . . reward[ing] (re)interrogation from an ecocritical angle” (75).
Kat Addis, exploring Ronsard's unfinished epic poetry, evokes the value of grappling with hyperobjects like the climate crisis through collective experiences situated “elsewhen,” as encapsulated in “proverbs . . . forc[ing] reckonings with that which we can only perceive in parts and . . . should not turn away from” (100). Goul individually analyzes how Montaigne and François Rabelais approach Diogenes the Cynic in relation to proliferating appetites portending the end of civilization: “the Cynics . . . resemble those urban ecologists, who try to sustain themselves in the middle of civilization. The Cynics’ . . . begging in the middle of the city . . . is also a humanist cosmopolitanism” (125).
Renaissance climate theories come to the fore in Sara Miglietti's evaluation of Loys Le Roy, Jean Bodin, and Nicolas Abraham de la Framboisière, whose “worldview in which . . . divisions between nature and culture . . . operated in different ways than they do nowadays . . . , ‘pseudo-scientific’ as [it] may seem today, . . . provide[s] us with an unexpected resource for rethinking the problems that haunt our own relationship to the so-called natural world” (138). Vis-à-vis Ronsard's renowned rose sonnet, Usher's solo chapter advocates for materially oriented “un-reading” in the sense that “behind the so-called carpe diem motif in Ronsard's ode there is . . . a carpe florem sense of plant time” (175).
Victor Velázquez scrutinizes unexpected reemergences of nature in Joachim du Bellay's ruin-filled verse, where “a meditation on . . . human-made artefacts and the culture in which they were created . . . lends itself to a reflection on the conservation of nonhuman nature” (182). Oumelbanine Nina Zhiri's Latourian appraisal of Bodin's accounts of subterranean treasure-seeking probes the nature-culture bifurcation at the root of modernity within the framework of sixteenth-century “networks . . . entail[ing] conceiving of things as something other or more than mere ‘things’” (220).
Oliver de Serres's richly illustrated agronomic reference work is dissected by Tom Conley via a word-and-image approach revealing how “the economy that goes with the concept and practice of mesnage has the tenor of a practical ecology” (259). Lively botanical representations in the writings of Montaigne and Guy de la Brosse receive the attention of Antónia Szabari, who identifies a mode of “accord[ing] agency to plants rather than taking the route of the forming proto-empiricist botany that avails itself of plants as objects to observe, collect” (278). A thirteen-page index completes the inspiring volume.
