Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance

by Robert N. Watson

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title

Sweeping across scholarly disciplines, Back to Nature shows that, from the moment of their conception, modern ecological and epistemological anxieties were conjoined twins. Urbanization, capitalism, Protestantism, colonialism, revived Skepticism, empirical science, and optical technologies conspired to alienate people from both the earth and reality itself in the seventeenth century. Literary and visual arts explored the resulting cultural wounds, expressing the pain and proposing some ingenious cures. The stakes, Robert N. Watson demonstrates, were huge.

Shakespeare's comedies, Marvell's pastoral lyrics, Traherne's visionary Centuries , and Dutch painting all illuminate a fierce submerged debate about what love of nature has to do with perception of reality.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction

448 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2005

Reviews

[Phillip · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very interesting argument tying depictions of the environment in late renaissance English literature to a contemporary epistemological crisis brought about by the the Protestant Reformation, the beginnings of the Scientific Revolution, exploration, and a renewed encounter with texts from the ostensibly more epistemologically sound classical era. Essentially, Watson identifies the late renaissance as the beginning of the crisis of modernity, and he argues that the ways in which English writers of this period engaged with nature represents a troubled attempt to get back to an epistemological certainty, with nature figuring as both the Edenic space of possible unity and the boundary that exposes the impossibility of that desire for unity.

[Patricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Watson manages to take on difficult ideas without being impenetrable. His comments on the present urgency to attend to ecological issues was convincing and deepened the book rather than making it anachronistic. The chapter on Merchant of Venice was especially illuminating.