Introduction Early Modern Ecostudies Karen Raber and Thomas Hallock F ew cultural categories resist critical scrutiny more easily than nature. The word itself implies a concreteness beyond the reach of historical or human influence. “Natural” conveys authenticity, a realness apart from culture or opinion. A sentence that begins, “It is natural,” uses the word as a synonym for “logically” or “of course”––as if to say that what follows is self-evident. (For instance, “It is natural that women want babies, that people of the opposite sex attract,” and so on.) Nature implies imperviousness to change, it points to physical laws of the universe beyond human control. Few people think of nature, in short, as a cultural category at all. The problem of “nature” becomes particularly vexed in academic circles, as we turn to the rapidly evolving field of ecocriticism. Literary ecology, or “green” cultural criticism, examines “the relationship between literature and the physical environment.” 1 But if one sees nature as a cultural category, the problems are immediately apparent in such a practice: how do we deal with literature, or works of the imagination, as part of the “physical” or nonhuman realm? In the introduction to a landmark collection of essays, The Ecocriticism Reader, Cheryll Glotfelty draws from the example of women’s studies, laying out three developmental stages. Ecocritics must first address images of nature, mapping the various stereotypes and changes in which the physical environment has been portrayed. The second step would be to recover a tradition (one Glotfetly immediately indicates begins around 1800 and which she loads heavily toward the present). Lastly, ecocritics need to theorize, “drawing on a wide range of theories to raise fundamental questions about . . . symbolic constructs.” 2 But what happens to concrete nature amidst these constructs? Many people have taken on this question over the past decade. Indeed, where a student may have struggled to identify a coherent scholarship about nature writing fifteen years ago, today there is a proliferation. The same year that The Ecocriticism Reader appeared, Lawrence Buell published The Environmental Imagination, a work that more than any single author book set the terms. In 1995, the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (or ASLE) held its first conference, and since then, ASLE has maintained its position as a flagship organization for ecostudies. In addition to its major biannual meeting, the group holds regular off-year symposia and mini-conferences, hosts nine Kamps_introduction.indd 1 Kamps_introduction.indd 1 9/12/2008 5:46:18 PM 9/12/2008 5:46:18 PM