Nature et société, de la Rome ancienne à la première modernité : représentations, savoirs, hantises

This 3rd volume of the ERA series, which is dedicated to environmental reflexivity in Roman antiquity and its extensions into the early modern period, deals with the relationship between nature and society. How were interactions with nature thought about and represented – nature as a framework of existence and an object of human activities, as cosmic order and ethical norm, as a force of production and destruction? The thirteen contributions brought together here offer various accounts of this through Latin, neo-Latin and vernacular literature.

The first part presents idealized visions and models inspired by nature; landscapes of early Rome in the Augustan era, descriptions of the locus amoenus by the late poets Reposianus and Tiberianus, and allegorical images in the treatises on poetics of Joachim Vadian, Marco Girolamo Vida, and Julius Caesar Scaliger. The second part is centred on the rational exploitation of resources: sociocultural ‘heritagization’ of water in the 1st century AD, praise of agricultural work in the Hortulus of the Benedictine monk Walafrid Strabo, and endorsement of agronomy through the publishing activity of the Renaissance. The third part focuses on the denunciations of the damage caused by Roman civilization, regarding the extinction of the North African elephant (Pliny the Elder, Themistius), or the violations inflicted on nature by human greed and the taste for luxury (Seneca, Lucan, Saint Jerome). The fourth part concerns the perception of natural risks and disasters (fires, volcanic eruptions, floods and epidemics, earthquakes), as political opportunities for munificence, religious interpretations of divine punishment, or scholarly explanations inherited from Antiquity.