Contrary to some accounts, particularly older ones, which portray Clare as a lonely, isolated, and somewhat misanthropic figure, he was a man with a rich social life who had many friends, including literary figures, antiquarians, ornithologists, entomologists, botanists, and artists. Through these friendships, he was abreast of contemporary thought and techniques, and, if only at second hand, he was in touch with the activities of some of the leading naturalists in this country and abroad. This obviously led to an increased knowledge and sophistication in Clare’s understanding of nature, as well as leading to subtle changes in his attitude to the natural world. In particular, it meant that he no longer regarded a love of nature as something to be rather ashamed of, but instead as something which he was able to celebrate.

This chapter traces John Clare’s unusual lifelong sympathy with plants. The bard of wildflowers wrote about the botanical world again and again, not only drawing on plants for numerous poems, but also recording his observations in botanical lists and Natural History Letters. Other men’s flowers, which he came across in his reading, cross-fertilized with his own habitual experience of local flora, to create poetry of startling freshness. The chapter draws primarily on Clare’s writings on flowers, trees, and grass but is also indebted to the work of key botanical critics and writers such as Molly Mahood and Richard Mabey, as well as recent environmental trends in Clare studies. Clare’s closely observed, celebratory, and elegiac poetry of plants demonstrates his vital importance for the twenty-first century, by alerting us to the irreplaceable value of the natural world.

This chapter presents new, annotated translations of the testimonia and fragments (mostly from Pliny the Elder) of various works by Augustus’ client king Juba II of Mauretania (active c.27 BC–AD 23/4), selected with a focus on geographical material. This is the first such collection of his geographical writings. The chapter introduction emphasizes his links with the former Ptolemaic dynasty through his queen, Kleopatra Selene (daughter of Mark Antony and Kleopatra VII), links which the royal couple kept up through iconography and patronage within their kingdom. Juba’s outstanding literary output can be seen as another reflection of this connexion, aimed at integrating Mauretania into the Greco-Roman cultural sphere and conferring distinction upon the kingdom. His geographical writing embodied travels and researches extending as far as Egypt and western Asia, and was based on a close appreciation of earlier writers including Agatharchides (Chapter 15 of this volume). His wide-ranging cultural and scientific interests are well represented in the extracts, particular highlights being the course of the Nile (believed to have its source within Mauretania), the fauna of the Canary Islands, and the discovery and naming of the plant family Euphorbiaceae, the spurges. A new map illustrates the range of Juba’s geographical interests, spanning the whole longitudinal range of the Roman empire south of the Mediterranean.

This chapter investigates the peculiar human habit of attributing political qualities to honeybees. It shows that by distinguishing a ‘queen bee’ from ‘workers’ we continue a tradition that has its roots in classical antiquity and in Aristotle’s inclusion of honeybees among the zōa politika (the ‘political animals’). The chapter asks why honeybees ‘need’ politics and why human politics ‘needs’ honeybees. The answer to these questions in the context of the ancient world shows what is at stake in current attempts to draw lines between humans and other social animals. The chapter shows that for the purpose of theorizing about human politics as well as in the scientific study of the natural world itself, to naturalize often means to normalize. The chapter shows that this frequently occurs in ways that resonate with what has been called ‘the naturalist fallacy’: the idea that because something occurs in nature it is by definition good.

Chapter One shows how intersections between science and antiquarianism in the eighteenth century renewed Europeans’ awareness of the hidden depths of history. This re-discovery of deep time contributed to Romanticism’s modern, historicist consciousness by expanding the time scale, secularising and destabilising fixed chronologies, and providing writers with a rich array of source materials from pre-history, Classical and Eastern Antiquity, and the Middle Ages. Using late-Romantic poet Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s’ ‘The Marl Pit’ as a guiding thread, it addresses Baron d’Hancarville’s archaeological work in Naples, the Comte de Buffon’s natural history, the Forsters’ travel accounts of their tour around the world, and early volumes of Herder’s Ideas Toward a Philosophy of the History of Humanity. The chapter then evokes the meeting in Rome of Nicolas Desmarest and J.J. Winckelmann to demonstrate how natural historians and antiquaries joined forces to understand the past. Contrasting William Blake’s imaginative interpretation of medieval history as a source of national identity with Horace Walpole’s sceptical view, it concludes by addressing the growing rift between a Romantic and more rigorously scientific apprehension of the past.

Exchanges between Eastern and Western cultures were central to representations of human-animal relations in the eighteenth century. When in 1713 Alexander Pope published an essay against cruelty to animals, he observed how “Everyone knows how remarkable the Turks are for their Humanity in this kind.” This chapter explains how feeling for fellow creatures was coupled in English minds with Eastern – Ottoman and Arab as well as Persian and Indian – compassion for them. Derived from mercantile, scholarly, and scientific exchanges; travelers’ tales; and widely circulating translations of Eastern beast fables, what Srinivas Aravamudan calls “Enlightenment Orientalism” is examined in relation to a contemporary Ottoman representation of animals, the natural history and storytelling of Evliya Çelebi (1611–c. 1687). It also considers such texts as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Pope’s Windsor-Forest and Essay on Man, James Thomson’s The Seasons, and Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne. These texts present different versions of multiple species of animal kind as “peoples” in the sense of the Qur’anic verse, explicated by Sarra Tlili, that ‘”there is not an animal in the earth nor a flying creature flying on two wings, but they are people like you.”

This chapter will discuss a Latin translation of an Arabic text on the pharmacological uses of the individual body parts of animals. De sexaginta animalibus is placed in the context of its original Arabic genre of works on the useful or occult virtues of animals, minerals, and plants. This is the first detailed scholarly treatment of this text, which has been mentioned in passing by other scholars. It argues that it is a translation of a work on the properties of the body parts of animals by the eleventh-century physician ʿUbaydallāh ibn Bukhtīshūʿ, by comparing the text with the manāfiʿ (usefulness) section from an Arabic Ibn Bukhtīshūʿ bestiary. Other issues covered include the copious use of transliterated Arabic terminology, particularly in regard to the names of the numerous animals themselves and confusion in their identification, the order of the animals (which aids identification of partial copies of the manuscript), cited authorities, and ascribed authorship. The chapter also argues for the existence of two recensions of the text in the manuscript tradition, with a comparison of an entry found in both recensions with the Ibn Bukhtīshūʿ text and ʿĪsā ibn ʿAlī’s Book on the Useful Properties of Animal Parts.

The introduction showcases colonial officials, missionaries and natural history collectors who, alongside Indigenous interlocutors and metropolitan advocates, sought to collect and use Antipodean information. Three key fields of knowledge emerged from the Australian colonies, and they reveal the relationship between knowledge formation and print culture. Part 1, Imagining Settler Humanitarianism, examines key debates about convictism, race and morality. Part 2, Regulating Settler Society, focuses on convictism and the forms of knowledge about reforming the self and regulating society that emerged from penal experiments. Part 3, Inventing Settler Science, shows how the scientific novelty of the Australian colonies attracted attention from the Endeavour voyage onwards, and inaugurated networks of correspondence, collection and publication that struggled to account for the Indigenous knowledge and participation that characterised the colonies.

Part I has demonstrated Jamaican engagement in the study of the Caribbean natural world from the 1740s into the 1760s by reconstructing the careers of two naturalists, Patrick Browne and Anthony Robinson. Many Jamaicans appear in their accounts: the enslaved and the free, White and Black, poor, middling, and wealthy, male and female. Browne and Robinson struggled with intellectual tasks firmly tethered to metropolitan agendas: making Linnaean taxonomy work on the ground, and collating information from publications and their own experience to arrive at a fuller, more accurate account of Caribbean nature. Yet they were also deeply embedded in Caribbean society, and their success depended on local support. This included White male colonists who self-consciously engaged in typical Enlightenment practices while enjoying the benefits of intellectual stimulation and camaraderie. These practices also enabled them to cultivate disciplined and civil identities in a brutal slave society; they constituted them as a purposeful group that could include the scions of a prominent planter family and a pen keeper while excluding the enslaved and the female from their charmed circle of learning.

Gilbert White – famed naturalist, clergyman, and sometime-poet – played with the relationship between echoes and poetry in surprising ways in his Natural History of Selborne (1789). White used Latin poetry as an instrument to measure echoes, and he played around with English prosodic ideas about ‘sound echoing’ sense. This chapter’s reading of White’s echo play highlights the ways in which assumptions baked into our category of ‘poetry’ – that it isn’t science, that it is an unlikely instrument for measurements, that it has something to do with expressive subjectivity, that in English it involves feet and substitutions – can obscure what and how people heard in the past. We should be wary of using understandings of lyric forged by Romantic poets and anachronistically instituted as central to all poetry to make sense of how and why someone like White engaged it. We should be wary of assuming even something as basic as how many syllables people of the past heard in particular lines.

This contribution traces the singular significance of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy for Sebald’s literary as well as literary critical writings. It offers a discussion of Sebald’s adaptation of Benjaminian theorems and reflections, focussing in particular on the philosophy of history, conceptions of natural history, the epistemological functionalization of melancholia, and a materialist understanding of memory.

Against the longstanding force of charges that certain sexualities are ‘unnatural’, Anne Lister grounds her astonishing confidence squarely in an argument about nature. For her, nature serves as a rationale rather than a general prohibition or quasi-juridical bar against a sexual expression she had reason to consider fairly unique. Indeed, Lister’s interpretation of nature provided not only a lens, or even a kind of permission, but a profound authorisation of who or what she saw herself to be, of what she called ‘my ways’. Rather than seeing herself as turning away from nature or somehow violating its laws, she was doing the opposite: she was following natural prescriptions. ’Odd’, surely, and ’queer’ in the broadest sense - but not ‘deviant’. How, then, did Lister understand nature, itself one of the richest concepts in the history of ideas? What intellectual, scientific and theological resources made this reading of nature available to her, and what innovations did she add to the repertoire? The chapter elucidates Lister’s brilliant synthesis of theology, Latin poetry and natural history to naturalise her ‘ways’ - indeed, to the point where she could assert ‘When we leave nature, we leave our only steady guide, and, from that moment, become inconsistent with ourselves’ as a queer motto for erotic persuasion.

This chapter centers on the controversy between Lord Wellesley (1798–1805) and the Company’s Court of Directors over the College of Fort William. It shows that this controversy turned fundamentally on the danger Wellesley’s pet project posed to the Company state. The college served to aggrandize the governor-general at the directors’ expense and to establish his own legitimacy with multiple audiences. It would do this not through conciliation but through the projection of an image of grandeur consonant with a kingly territorial sovereignty. In a sign of the threat posed by Wellesley’s ideas, the directors continued to fear them long after his departure. Ongoing disputes over books, natural history, and scholar-officials suggested that his “revolution” was far from finished.

In her chapter, Silvia Sebastiani treats Scottish Enlightenment thinking about the history of society as the product of a dialogue with natural history as well as moral philosophy. The key reference points were Buffon’s Natural History and Rousseau’s Discourse on inequality: from these the Scots derived two rival accounts of how natural man became historical. One conceived of history as the ‘progress of society’ through successive ‘stages’ of development, culminating in the attainment of ‘civilisation’. With contributions from David Hume, Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith, this account was premised on the idea of a uniform human nature, but did not exclude the possibility of hierarchies between humans, and attached lesser value to forms of social organisation preceding civilisation. The alternative, explored at length by Lord Monboddo, a practising judge, took Rousseau’s assertion of the ‘perfectibility’ of man as an invitation to appreciate the variety of ways (physical as well as moral) in which humans might develop, and to accept that quite different outcomes were possible, corruption and decline as much as progress. There was no single Scottish conception of the ‘progress of society’, and the normative implications of stadial history were less uniformly positive than its later admirers have supposed.

To provide context for the later chapters and analysis, the chapter outlines the key characteristics of Europe’s environment and nature, and the effects of human actions on it. It firstly describes the biophysical geography and natural history of Europe, including the legacy of the last Ice Age, and the current characteristics of the biogeographical regions and marine regions. It then summarises the main impacts of human activities on biodiversity in Europe, starting with early agriculture and forest clearances that created seminatural ecosystems and cultural landscapes, followed by the profound impacts of the industrial and agricultural revolutions, and more recent changes in land- and sea-use and resulting pressures over the last forty years. Other key pressures are also identified, including in relation to forestry, water and air pollution, fisheries, invasive alien species and climate change. The chapter concludes with an outline of Europe’s remaining biodiversity, identifying hotspots, and the implications for nature conservation approaches and priorities.

The interconnections within the natural world as observed by European explorers and armchair cosmographers connected meaningfully in the eighteenth century with the longer history of early modern cosmopolitanism, relying on an evolving understanding of the globe and its peoples in all their particularities and diversity. This chapter examines the tenets of eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism through the natural sciences by examining how individual actors, largely based in Europe, explored their world and described its geographies. Working across the disciplines of cartography, natural history, and ethnography, these individuals aspired to be inclusive within a cosmopolitan frame but often struggled to articulate a universal principle about whose knowledge should be included and whose voices should be excluded. These practices became critical sites of cosmopolitan contestation as they underlined a highly ambivalent attitude toward local sources of knowledge while proclaiming Europe’s unequivocal ability to describe and depict nature and space with a particularly vehement denigration of the tropical regions of the globe and their inhabitants.

This chapter examines the impact of experimental philosophy in France from the mid-1730s through to the period in which the philosophes were at the forefront of French intellectual life, the period normally called the French Enlightenment. The chapter opens with a discussion of the reception of Bacon’s views about natural history and the acceptance of experimental philosophy more generally in the early Parisian Academy. It then turns to the heyday of experimental philosophy in France which began in the mid-1730s with its promotion by the likes of Voltaire and Comte de Buffon, and the courses in experimental philosophy taught by Abbé Nollet. It is argued that the anti-speculative sentiment so prevalent in Britain manifests itself in the anti-system debate in France. And the chapter goes on to examine the alignment between Buffon’s conception of natural history and that of Bacon, the Baconianism of Denis Diderot, and the influence of experimental philosophy on Jean Le Rond d’Alembert as manifest in his ‘Preliminary Discourse’ to the Encyclopédie. The chapter concludes with an appraisal of the rehabilitation of Descartes, who up to that point had come to be regarded by many as the archetypal speculative philosopher.