Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity

This essay collection is as much a memorial of the work and person of the late Sylvia Bowerbank, the scholar probably best known for her role in establishing Margaret Cavendish as a significant early modern writer and for her own ecofeminist work on early modern writers, as it is an active engagement with her works. It begins by invoking Bowerbank’s own claim that: “To speak for nature is to speak powerfully.” What, however, such a “speaking for” might entail, in whose interests and in whose name, and how women are and were involved in this is a complicated question that the contributors of this volume seek to flesh out: “we aim not only to challenge our notion of how early modern women may or may not have spoken for (or even with […]) Nature but also to demonstrate how tracing the diverse ways of speaking vis-à-vis Nature in one historical period can help us rethink, retheorize, and revise our notion of such speaking in ecofeminist, feminist, and ecocritical studies in our own“ (p. 1).