Environmental Humanities in Pre-modern Cultures
About the Book Series
This series in environmental humanities offers approaches to medieval, early modern, and global pre-industrial cultures from interdisciplinary environmental perspectives. We invite submissions (both monographs and edited collections) in the fields of ecocriticism, specifically ecofeminism and new ecocritical analyses of under-represented literatures; queer ecologies; posthumanism; waste studies; environmental history; environmental archaeology; animal studies and zooarchaeology; landscape studies; ‘blue humanities’, and studies of environmental / natural disasters and change and their effects on pre-modern cultures.
Humans and Aquatic Animals in Early Modern America and Africa
1st Edition
By Cristina Brito
January 10, 2026
This book deals with peoples’ practices, perceptions, emotions and feelings towards aquatic animals, their ecosystems and nature on the early modern Atlantic coasts by addressing exploitation, use, fear, empathy, otherness, and indifference in the relationships established with aquatic environments...
Anglo-Saxon Literary Landscapes: Ecotheory and the Environmental Imagination
1st Edition
By Heide Estes
January 09, 2026
Literary scholars have traditionally understood landscapes, whether natural or manmade, as metaphors for humanity instead of concrete settings for people's actions. This book accepts the natural world as such by investigating how Anglo-Saxons interacted with and conceived of their lived ...
Cold Tyranny and the Demonic North of Early Modern England
1st Edition
By Anne Cotterill
December 01, 2025
The seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were among the worst years of the Little Ice Age. This volume attends to English texts from this period to trace associations between wintry physical landscapes and an icy inner landscape of human cruelty and tyranny whose rigors promote the ultimate ...
Early Modern Écologies: Beyond English Ecocriticism
1st Edition
Edited
By Pauline Goul
December 01, 2025
Early Modern Écologies is the first collective volume to offer perspectives on the relationship between contemporary ecological thought and early modern French literature. If Descartes spoke of humans as being ‘masters and possessors of Nature’ in the seventeenth century, the writers taken up in ...
Encountering Water in Early Modern Europe and Beyond: Redefining the Universe through Natural Philosophy, Religious Reformations, and Sea Voyaging
1st Edition
By Lindsay Starkey
December 01, 2025
Both the Christian Bible and Aristotle’s works suggest that water should entirely flood the earth. Though many ancient, medieval, and early modern Europeans relied on these works to understand and explore the relationships between water and earth, sixteenth-century Europeans particularly were ...
Old English Ecotheology: The Exeter Book
1st Edition
By Courtney Barajas
December 01, 2025
Old English Ecotheology examines the impact of environmental crises on early medieval English theology and poetry. Like their modern counterparts, theologians at the turn of the first millennium understood the interconnectedness of the Earth community, and affirmed the independent subjectivity of ...
Shakespeare's Botanical Imagination
1st Edition
Edited
By Susan C. Staub
December 01, 2025
Writing on the cusp of modern botany and during the heyday of English herbals and garden manuals, Shakespeare references at least 180 plants in his works and makes countless allusions to horticultural and botanical practices. Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination moves plants to the foreground of ...
The Eco-Self in Early Modern English Literature
1st Edition
By Elizabeth Gruber
December 01, 2025
The Eco-Self in Early Modern English Literature tracks an important shift in early modern conceptions of selfhood, arguing that the period hosted the birth of a new subset of the human, the eco-self, which melds a deeply introspective turn with an abiding sense of humans’ embedment in the world. A ...
The Environmental Legacy of War on the Hungarian-Ottoman Frontier, c. 1540-1690
1st Edition
By András Vadas
December 01, 2025
This book is the first monographic attempt to follow the environmental changes that took place in the frontier zone of the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. On the one hand, it looks at how the Ottoman–Hungarian wars affected the landscapes of the...
Water and Cognition in Early Modern English Literature
1st Edition
Edited
By Nicholas Helms, Steve Mentz
December 01, 2025
Water and cognition seem unrelated things, the one a physical environment and the other an intellectual process. The essays in this book show how bringing these two modes together revitalizes our understanding of both. Water and especially oceanic spaces have been central to recent trends in the ...
Ecological Imperialism in Early Modern Spanish Narratives: Excavating the Environmental Conflicts of the Iberian Globalization
1st Edition
By Miguel Ibáñez Aristondo
December 16, 2024
How are the environmental conflicts of our time intertwined with the legacies of Spanish imperialism and early modern globalization? In Ecological Imperialism in Early Modern Spanish Narratives: Excavating the Environmental Conflicts of the Iberian Globalization, Miguel Ibáñez Aristondo argues that...