The Oeconomy of Nature: Literature and Ecology in the English

THE OECONOMY OF NATURE: LITERATURE AND ECOLOGY IN THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE by PETER C. REMIEN B.S., Central Michigan University, 2003 M.A., University of Colorado at Boulder, 2006 A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Colorado in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English 2012 This dissertation entitled: The Oeconomy of Nature: Literature and Ecology in the English Renaissance written by Peter C. Remien has been approved by the Department of English ______________________________________ Associate Professor David Glimp ______________________________________ Associate Professor Katherine Eggert Date______________ The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we Find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards Of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline. iii Remien, Peter C. (Ph.D. English) The Oeconomy of Nature: Literature and Ecology in the English Renaissance Dissertation directed by Associate Professor David Glimp Abstract My dissertation focuses on the development of the proto-ecological concept of “the oeconomy of nature” in works of literature and natural philosophy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Tracing interconnections between the discourse of estate management and the rhetoric of natural philosophy, I find that “oeconomy” (the early modern art of household management) provides a conceptual vocabulary through which thinkers understood the natural world as a self-regulating system made up of independent agents. Through readings of Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, George Herbert, Kenelm Digby, Margaret Cavendish, and John Milton, my dissertation challenges recent accounts of early modern environmental thought by highlighting the historicity of concepts such as “ecology” and “environment” and by unearthing an alternative terminology that early modern thinkers used to understand the material world. The first three chapters trace a genealogy of the oeconomy of nature in the writings of natural philosopher Kenelm Digby through the work of his two principal literary influences, Edmund Spenser and Ben Jonson. Spenser and Jonson paved the way for the oeconomy of nature by representing divergent paradigms for understanding the natural world. Through this grouping of texts, I contend that, rather than existing at the margins of scientific epistemology, imaginative literature serves a critical function in the development of new forms of knowledge. I argue that Digby develops the oeconomy of nature as a way of reconciling the discourse of Baconian empiricism, with its tendency to fragment nature into observable parts, with his desire to produce an integrated model of the natural world. Chapters 4 and 5 then focus on the ways in which iv George Herbert and Margaret Cavendish respond to ambiguity regarding the human subject’s position in the oeconomy of nature. Attentive to the dynamic interplay between works of imaginative literature and those of natural philosophy, my project asserts that literature plays an important and generally underappreciated role in the development of scientific thought. v CONTENTS INTRODUCTION……………………..……………………………………………...1 CHAPTER I. KENELM DIGBY’S EMPIRICAL IMAGINATION ............................24 II. SPENCER’S SYLVAN MATTER .........................................................59 III. JONSON’S UNIVERSAL PARASITE ..................................................95 IV. HERBERT’S PROVIDENTIAL OECONOMY ..................................133 V. NATURE’S HOUSE ............................................................................178 EPILOGUE……………………..…………………………………………………..206 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………..……………………………………………214 1 INTRODUCTION THE OECONOMY OF NATURE: A SURVEY OF SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY IDEAS In recent years, a number of studies called attention to ways in which early modern writers engaged with ecological ideas.1 Diane McColley, for example, focuses on how the vitalist poetics of writers like Andrew Marvell, John Milton, and Margaret Cavendish “rejects the fallacy that only human perceptions matter,” and, in turn, offers an ecological alternative to the literature of human dominion.2 Taking a more historicist position, Todd Borlik considers how various environmental crises in early modern Britain, such as London air pollution and the draining of the fens, occasioned literary responses that reinvigorated the age-old genre of the pastoral. In Milton and Ecology, Ken Hiltner contends that Milton’s monist theology anticipates Heidegger’s ecological readings of the Bible. Finally, beginning with the observation that the early modern rubric “man” both includes and excludes women, Sylvia Bowerbank argues that a woman’s liminal position in early modern culture authorizes her to “speak for nature” in ways unavailable to men.3 These studies have served a number of important functions in further historicizing environmentalist thought—the germ of which had traditionally been located in the romantic period—and in introducing previously unappreciated aspects of early modern representations of nature. However, these studies also tend to use the term “ecology”—which does not appear in English until 1876 and does not reach theoretical maturity until well into the twentieth century— fairly indiscriminately, without regard to the concept’s complex and theoretically rich history. 2 One of the central goals of this project is to provide a pre-history of the notion of ecology grounded in seventeenth century ideas and concepts.4 In particular, I trace the solidification of the discourse of providential design in the seventeenth century into the concept of oeconomy, through which the natural world is beneficently arranged by God for human use. From here I chart the subsequent shift from this theological discourse into the realm of natural history through the less anthropocentric, but still economically based, concept of “the oeconomy of nature.” In both of these iterations of proto-ecological discourse, the preeminently anthropocentric space of the household (oikos)—which supplies the etymological root of both “economy” and “ecology”—provides an oeconomic, that is, rational, use-centered, and anthropocentric, model through which early moderns understood the workings of the natural world. I will retain the early modern spelling “oeconomy” to highlight the extent to which notions of the household structured the understanding of the world. Through the conceptual metaphorics of oeconomy—which, as we shall see, enjoy a rich and diverse poetic tradition—the theological and the scientific coalesce into the economic as the central organizational principle of the universe. While my study engages with the emergence of increasingly rational models for understanding the workings of the natural world, I do not mean to suggest that these narratives were the only ways in which early moderns conceptualized nature. Historian Paula Findlen, for example, points out the notion of lusus naturae, jokes of nature, largely inherited from classical natural historians such as Pliny, served to undermine rational, use-based notions of nature that would become central to the science of the eighteenth century. Indeed, as my study shall make clear, I am more interested in the ways in which early modern writers such as Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, and Margaret Cavendish complicate oeconomic narratives of the natural world than 3 the ways in which they reproduce them. There is a sense in which this project might unfold as theological or scientific history rather than a literary study, but, as I hope to show, literature offers a particularly rich field for studying the ways in which this complex discourse unfolds in the early modern imagination.5 What a work of literature, as opposed to a scientific treatise or Christian sermon, offers is a site in which disparate discourses can interconnect in experimental and often playful ways. As Harry Berger’s classic study of the renaissance imagination suggests, a literary work allows an author to explore an imaginative “green world” through which he or she can experimentally conceptualize and reconceputalize the world he or she inhabits. Since my study aims to resonate with the concerns of contemporary environmentalists, I am interested in the ethical implications of economic narratives of environmental use. Despite the ostensible simplicity of the term, “use” is an extraordinarily rich and complex concept in early modern thought, with spiritual and ethical as well as oeconomic implications.6 A crucial aspect of this study is to clarify the complex ways this term is used by thinkers such as John Milton and Henry More. One important implication of this study is that our own ways of understanding the natural world are more mired in the conceptual metaphorics of human oeconomy than most of us acknowledge. As Michael Zimmerman points out, western thought, at a fundamental level, tends to conceptualize the world in instrumentalist and technological terms—a point taken up by Heidegger in his critique of modernity: The metaphysical schemes of Plato and Aristotle, Heidegger argued, were based on the view that the structure of all things is akin to the structure of products or artifacts. Aristotle’s metaphysics, for example, is ‘productionist’ insofar as he conceived of all things, including animals, as ‘formed matter.’ The most obvious example of such ‘formed 4 matter’ is the work produced by an artisan who gives form to material. Plato and Aristotle

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