Abstract
This chapter examines historical and recent ecocritical and/or ecofeminist scholarship concerning early modern women’s writing. Beginning with Carolyn Merchant’s seminal 1980 book, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (a work that grew out of both the second-wave feminism and the twentieth-century environmental writing), the chapter then traces Merchant’s scholarly descendants, primarily the work of Silvia Bowerbank, Jennifer Munroe, and Rebecca Laroche, among others. These writers demonstrate how early modern women employed the natural environment as a way to mediate a patriarchal system that oppressed both women and nature. A short reading of a seventeenth-century receipt (recipe) book, belonging to Margaret Yelverton (MS British Library Add 28327), argues that Yelverton’s knowledge of and work with the natural world were instrumental in her ability to maintain the health of her family and her community, and ultimately to benefit the plants she cultivated and the fauna dependent on that flora. The chapter concludes with an argument that past ecological acts and writings can help us negotiate our own looming environmental crises.
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Tigner, A.L. (2022). Ecocriticism/Ecofeminism. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women's Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01537-4_367-1
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Ecocriticism/Ecofeminism- Published:
- 13 November 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01537-4_367-2
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Ecocriticism/Ecofeminism- Published:
- 13 December 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01537-4_367-1