The Greener Inhumanity of Renaissance Pastoral: A Posthumanist Reading of the Bucolic Literature of Early Modern England and Italy

Pederson, Alicia Sands

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-twrg-b987

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The Greener Inhumanity of Renaissance Pastoral: A Posthumanist Reading of the Bucolic Literature of Early Modern England and Italy

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In a new analysis of Renaissance pastoral that draws on ecocriticism, queer theory, and a historicist approach, this dissertation finds a green and inhuman world that opposes the modern view that humans differ significantly from, and enjoy a right of dominion over, nonhuman species and the environment. Through readings of English and Italian pastorals by William Shakespeare, Niccolò Machiavelli, Edmund Spenser, Torquato Tasso, John Fletcher, and others, this dissertation demonstrates that “nature” is not a physical environment that stands apart from humans and human culture, but a hereditary force that makes offspring resemble their parents, a procreative passion impelling all creatures to reproduce their kind, and an enchanted territory that worships the presiding monarch. The “biocentric” worldview represented in these works attenuates the species barrier between human and nonhuman, since humans are represented as animals whose behaviors are determined by forces, mainly relating to heredity and reproduction, external to reason and free will. At the same time, the pastoral view of nature fortifies social divisions within the human population, since class differences are regarded as analogous to (and caused by the same hereditary mechanism responsible for) differences in domesticated breeds of animals and stocks of plants. This dissertation builds on archival research on the manuscripts of Machiavelli’s “Capitolo Pastorale” to present an original interpretation of an under-examined poem in the context of Machiavelli’s career. Through its novel application of queer theory and ecocriticism, and through its fresh historicization of nature in pastoral literature, this dissertation challenges traditional interpretations of pastoral while providing a new critical approach to this important early modern genre.

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