When I came across a description of Sylvia Bowerbanks’ Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England, as a book combining women’s and ecological history, I had to lay hands on it. Which isn’t to say I didn’t have my doubts: would this be one of those books that seeks to imprint, wholly inappropriately, modern thoughts and approaches into history? But I needn’t have worried, for this is an impeccable well though-out, academic book, that examines its characters in the terms of their own time, while applying understanding and research of the following centuries.

Bowerbanks begins by explaining that she wants to go back into history to seek the origins of the apparent modern links between women and nature. If, as Ynestra King claimed in “The Eco-Feminist Imperative”, women are “the repository of a sensibility” that can save the planet, where does this begin, what does it go back to?

Of course in early modern times the talk was not of “environment”, but “nature”.

“In theory, woman remained the subordinate mediatrix between man and nature and yet, even this degraded placement afforded her compensatory powers. Insofar as woman was ‘man’ on the one hand, she could potentially lay claim to agency in the modern project to civilise nature. Insofar as she was ‘nature’, she could lay claim to a special capacity to speak for nature – especially as men began to pride themselves on their increasing detachment from nature. Furthermore, insofar as woman was both ‘nature’ and ‘man’, she could critique the modern project of mastery, even as she reached towards a distinctive knowledge of nature, based on the radicalized concept of compassion that might be termed the beginning of an ecological sensibility.” (p4-5)

Bowerbanks begins with Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomeries Urania (1621), walking to the famed Penshurst (immortalised by Ben Jonson’s economium, which has the estate as a haven of balance of the human and natural orders. Yet, she explains, this was no such haven for the young Mary, who as a girl was whipped around England and the Continent, which marks Wroth’s work, which has “an extistential homelessness, together with a longing for a lost past”. (P.30) This nostalgia, Bowerbanks suggests, develops as a tool for early capitalism/consumer culture – the grieving for a lost green world can encourage the purchase of attempts to recover it.

And for Wroth, nature herself participates in this grieving, a labour mostly performed for Wroth by women, becomes at one with it. e.g. Liana lies “her head on the roote of a weeping willow, which dropped downe her teares into the Christalline streames…Shee lay betweene the body of that sad tree, and the river which passed close by it, running as if in haste to carry their sorroes from them” (p.34)

This was published in the same year as Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, but Urania is profoundly modern – a symptom of malaise and scepticism, whereas for Burton it was medieval, rooted in sin.

For while Wroth often seems to wallow in the disappearing pleasures of the aristocratic hunt, the absolute powers granted to her class by the forest laws, which were gradually being eroded, she’s also, Bowerbanks finds, questioning, critical: “evokes an environment — so abundant, so various, so yielding and so flattering to a noble woman’s charms — she does so to expose the grim realities of rape, abuse, violence and alienation that, in every grove, threaten woman’s safety and well-being.”(p. 50)

For Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, recently recovered as a serious, original 17th-century thinker from the ridicule of centuries, there’s also this sense of loss, but also a clear desire to modernise, to reinvent, in line with the “male science” of the time from which she was firmly rebuffed. One of her interests was Sherwood Forest, which together with similar stretches of previous royal land by the Civil War was being steadily and indiscriminately used up. The great oaks of Welbeck Park were the particular focus.
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