Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-8mjnm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T00:22:50.251Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3 - ‘When is a Meadow not a Meadow?’: Dark Ecology and Fields of Conflict in French Renaissance Poetry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 November 2020

Get access

Summary

Abstract

In poetic responses to the French civil wars, the wounded political body of France is aligned with the ravaged body of the physical landscape in an array of arresting ecological images. By tracing a web of profoundly imbricated commonplaces and analogies concerning fields, bodies, and entrails in particular, this chapter investigates the ways in which the verse of Pierre de Ronsard and Agrippa d’Aubigné both rehearses and decries the unnatural twists and turns of that ‘intestine’ conflict. Both poets revive ancient expressions of ecological anxiety that disrupt what Timothy Morton has termed ‘agrilogistic thought’; but I argue that in their distinctive and sometimes challenging styles, their verse presents (and through syntactic violence, uncannily performs) a still more radical vision of human enmeshment in nature.

Keywords: Ronsard, d’Aubigné, civil wars, intestines, analogy

‘I’ve been kicked in the biosphere’

Political and environmental discourse of the French Renaissance is triangulated through the often violent or medicalized bodily imagery used to describe both state and landscape. In Pierre de Ronsard's poetic reworkings of Age of Gold lore, foundational moments of agricultural ‘sin’ are brought into dialogue with the religious polemic surrounding France's civil wars; later in the sixteenth century, the ‘body’ of the French landscape, like the body politic, suffers the ravages of the continuing wars, as lamented by Agrippa d’Aubigné. Images of entrails return insistently; employed, twisting and turning, both to figure France's internal turmoil (as vipers erupting fatally from their mother's belly) and as the site of affect in the face of civil violence. These visceral preoccupations are the strange and anxious ancestors of the tragicomic refrain in Dark Ecology, in which Timothy Morton argues that at the core of human-inflicted ecological destruction lies a toxic pattern of ‘agrilogistic’ thought: ‘I’ve been kicked in the biosphere’. Morton summarizes what he calls the ‘agrilogistic algorithm’ underpinning religion—and with it the logic of ‘civilization’—as consisting of the following ‘subroutines’: ‘eliminate contradiction and anomaly, establish boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, maximize existence over and above any quality of existing’. A little later, he elaborates: ‘Agrilogistic space is a war against the accidental. Weeds and pests are nasty accidents to minimize or eliminate’. The broader intellectual tendency that results from this ‘algorithm’ is the ‘cut-along-the-dotted-line’ thinking of discrete, easily separated concepts.

Type
Chapter
Information
Early Modern Écologies
Beyond English Ecocriticism
, pp. 73 - 98
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×