In this collection of essays, the Renaissance is located at the conceptual threshold of the Anthropocene. In French Studies, canonical authors express fears about the future of the planet that, while often set in a millenarian frame, anticipate or chime with ours. In the late chapters of the Quart Livre, the world under the ugly regime of the well-named Messer Gaster is going to seed. In the thick of the Wars of Religion, Ronsard decries the violence that fellow subjects have done both to the Americas and the forests of his homeland. In a celebrated passage of ‘Des coches’, following Lucretius, Montaigne writes tersely and typologically, ‘[l]’univers tombera en paralisie; l’un membre sera perclus, l’autre en vigueur. Bien crains-je que nous aurons bien fort hasté sa declinaison et sa ruyne par nostre contagion’ (‘the universe will fall into paralysis; one member will be shriveled, the other vigorous. I daresay that we will have strongly hastened its decline and ruin by our contagion’). For Montaigne, as if they belonged to a theatrum mundi or world-theatre, rampant depredation and ecological ruin were signs of the end of the world he had known.

Such was the context from which Olivier de Serres (1539–1619) emerged to be read here as a thinker concerned with human reshaping of the planet.