8 - Renascent Nature in the Ruins: Joachim du Bellay's Antiquitez de Rome
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
Summary
Abstract
Joachim du Bellay's Les Antiquitez de Rome (1558) is traditionally read as a text about human-made culture: the grandeur and ruin of Rome. Nevertheless, through a moral condemnation of imperial Rome's pride and its violent origins, Du Bellay describes the effects Rome's fall had on the nonhuman landscape, thus inviting a re-evaluation of the relation between humans and nonhuman nature. His juxtaposition of the destructiveness of history's blindness to nature with the landscape's re-emergence from the ruined remains of Roman culture yields images that challenge us to rethink conservation in relation to a nature that changes over time, and which is inseparable from culture and its ruins, while at the same time redefining the traditional presupposition of what we categorize as ‘nature writing’.
Keywords: Du Bellay, ruins, pride, time, natural cycle, regeneration
The intersection of technology, power, and hubris in the modern era has created a context in which we must rethink the relationship between human and nonhuman natures and cultures. Both the Anthropocene (according to one of its possible start dates) and the ecological turn in the study of literature can be situated in relation to the first detonation of nuclear weapons. According to some, our current epoch thus began in 1945, while more generally Gabriel Egan argues that environmentalism is ‘a response to the rapid increase in the power of human technologies and the hubris of the scientists and technocrats in charge of them’, with the first atomic test carried out by Oppenheimer and Segrè being selected as a turning point: ‘it carried a small, but quite real, chance (about one-in-fifty, some of them thought) of instantly igniting the world, and they decided to risk it’. Turning to sixteenth-century French texts in this context can help us reconceptualise the relation between humanity, human culture, and nonhuman nature. Some might resist such a move: in Forests: Shadow of Civilization, Robert Harrison argues that humanism divorces the human from the nonhuman, such that humans dominate nature. But claims such as that one merely confuse humanism with anthropocentrism. Early modern texts frequently explore the limits of humanity as well as humanity's place within the cosmos.
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- Early Modern ÉcologiesBeyond English Ecocriticism, pp. 181 - 202Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020