6 - Between Nature and Culture: The Integrated Ecology of Renaissance Climate Theories
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
Summary
Abstract
‘Climate theories’ are often explained away in scholarship as pseudo-sciences irrelevant to the modern world, or as morally problematic forms of geographic determinism. This chapter instead argues that such theories still offer a valuable lens not only for understanding how early modern people conceptualized the relationship between human culture and nonhuman nature, but also for resituating ourselves with respect to this very same issue. Are we humans above and outside nature, or are we an integral part of it, caught in its dynamics and affected by its internal changes—including those resulting from our own agency? Three sixteenth-century authors (Le Roy, Bodin, La Framboisière) are here brought into dialogue with contemporary thinkers (Descola, Latour) to reappraise the ‘integrated ecology’ of nature and culture proposed by early modern climate theorists.
Keywords: climate theory, nature/culture, determinism, Jean Bodin, Loys Le Roy, Nicolas Abraham de La Framboisière
Introduction
Clarence Glacken's monumental overview of environmental ideas from Antiquity to the Enlightenment, published in 1967 but still an essential reference in the field, includes several chapters on what are often called ‘climate theories’ (théories des climats, Klimatheorien, teorie dei climi). Such doctrines are centered on the idea that place and climate shape the body, mind, and character of human beings, influencing moreover the organization and development of human societies. In his book, Glacken explores several moments in the long tradition of climate theories, including their origins in ancient Greece (with authors such as Hippocrates and Aristotle), their medieval reception, and their presence in the early modern period, often thought to have represented their ‘golden age’. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, Glacken shows, climate theories reached an unprecedented level of visibility (they were somewhat ubiquitous) and complexity (they were put to many uses). While acknowledging their historical importance, however, Glacken claims that early modern climate theories represented a dead end on the path of intellectual development, and that ‘[i]t would be useless to claim that [these theories] contributed anything to understanding the relation of human cultures and their natural environment’. Glacken argues that these theories ‘could by no conceivable means lead to science’, and therefore considers them to be of only limited interest today. At best, he suggests, they have the negative merit of revealing ‘the inability of two millennia of accumulated lore to be of any real help in explanation’.
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- Information
- Early Modern ÉcologiesBeyond English Ecocriticism, pp. 137 - 160Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020