Seventeenth-century concepts of the nonhuman world: a nascent romanticism?

This paper revisits the historiography of romanticism, and challenges the view that the advent of a modern ecological vision was more or less coeval with romantic responses to industrialised modernity from the mid-eighteenth century. The paper privileges a longue durée of the legacy of romantic thought, identifying a nascent romanticism in seventeenth-century ecocritical thought engaged in a dialectical response to the era of early modern enlightenment rather than in a revaluation of the impact of subsequent developments in industrialised modernity. It investigates aspects of the seventeenth-century thought that anticipated romantic views of the non-human world in an era of significant climatic change, especially in philosophical concepts such as ontological monism and vitalism, and in a heightened empathy for the nonhuman world evident in seventeenth-century essays, poetry and art.