Ecocriticism/Ecofeminism

This entry examines historical and recent ecocritical and/or ecofeminist scholarship concerning early modern women’s writing. Beginning with Carolyn Merchant’s seminal 1980 book, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (a work that grew out of both second-wave feminism and twentieth-century environmental writing), this entry then traces Merchant’s scholarly descendants, primarily Silvia Bowerbank, Jennifer Munroe, and Rebecca Laroche, among others. These writers demonstrate how early modern women employed the natural environment as a way to mediate a patriarchal system that oppressed both women and nature. A short reading of a seventeenth-century receipt (recipe) book belonging to Margaret Yelverton (British Library, Add MS 28327), argues that Yelverton’s knowledge of and work with the natural world were instrumental in her ability to maintain the health of her family and her community, and ultimately to benefit the plants she cultivated and the fauna dependent on that flora. The entry concludes with an argument that past ecological acts and writings can help us negotiate our own looming environmental crises.