Exploring Early Ideas of the Marvelous Natural World with Rebecca Bushnell

Long before the Romantics embraced nature, people in the West saw the human and nonhuman worlds as both intimately interdependent and violently antagonistic. In this talk based on her recent anthology of nature writing before 1700, The Marvels of the World, Rebecca Bushnell offers a corrective to the still-prevalent tendency to dismiss premodern attitudes toward nature as simple or univocal.

Using examples from medical texts, herbals, and how-to books, as well as scientific, religious, philosophical, and poetic works dating from antiquity to the dawn of the Enlightenment, the talk will weave connections among these compelling pieces of the past, showing how early writers collected here wrote with extraordinary openness about ways of coexisting with the nonhuman forces that shaped them, even as they sought to control and exploit their environment.

About Rebecca Bushnell:

The School of Arts and Sciences Board of Advisers Emerita Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, Rebecca Bushnell is the author of books on subjects including Greek and Renaissance tragedy, early modern political thought, humanist pedagogy, early modern English gardening books, and time in drama, film, and videogames. Her newest book is The Marvels of the World: An Anthology of Nature Writing before 1700. She served as Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Penn and is a former President of the Shakespeare Association of America.