Annonce de publication

Écrire la catastrophe. L’Angleterre à l’épreuve des éléments (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles).

Sous la direction de Sophie Chiari

Parution le 14 novembre 2019 aux Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal [cliquez ici]

De par sa situation insulaire, l’Angleterre n’a cessé de s’approprier les récits des catastrophes naturelles qui ont façonné son histoire pour se forger une identité́ poétique qui lui est propre et affirmer une sensibilité particulière aux phénomènes extrêmes. Cet ouvrage se propose d’explorer la première modernité anglaise (XVIe – XVIIIe siècles), époque du « petit âge glaciaire » où l’écriture du moi l’emporte peu à peu sur l’écriture du nous, à travers le prisme de catastrophes naturelles vécues ou fantasmées par les dramaturges, les poètes, les théologiens, les philosophes et les explorateurs de la période.

Entre mathématisation du monde et reconstruction du réel, l’écriture de la catastrophe participe autant d’une volonté de résilience que d’un désir de mise en scène, comme le montrent les treize chapitres du livre : les récits d’événements hors-normes sont tous soigneusement construits et contribuent à unir une contrée en proie à des tensions religieuses et à une forte instabilité politique. Il s’agit pour les écrivains de dépasser la terreur suscitée par les inondations, les vents violents, les tremblements de terre et le froid glacial, afin de promouvoir une vision sociale prônant l’entraide et une réflexion sur la manière dont foi et science peuvent se nourrir l’une l’autre, sans oublier de mettre en avant l’image d’une Angleterre endurante et conquérante.

Cette poétique du cataclysme permet en outre de mettre en lumière les rapports que les contemporains de Shakespeare, de Bacon ou de Cook entretenaient avec une Nature désenchantée et progressivement muée en « environnement ». Plus encore, elle nous conduit à mieux comprendre comment et pourquoi l’avènement de l’Anthropocène, ère géologique qui correspond au moment où les effets de l’activité humaine ont véritablement commencé à modifier notre écosystème, est situé par certains climatologues au début du xviie siècle.

Continuer la lecture

Francis Bacon and the Mastery of the Winds

In 1622 Sir Francis Bacon published his Historia ventorum, a systematic natural history of the winds. In the work Bacon sought to answer a number of outstanding questions about the nature of the winds, which had exercised scholars from Aristotle onwards, including notably their origins and the causes of their potentially threatening ‘great and violent motion’. This chapter argues that, as well as an important intervention into early modern science, Bacon’s history of the winds also sprang from his political philosophy and his lifelong interests in trade, commerce, and colonization. While these elements have all received careful attention from Baconian scholars in recent years, their significance for the Historia ventorum has not been sufficiently noted. In this chapter I therefore trace their connections with Bacon’s natural history to offer a new account of that work and thereby show how it (and his interest in the winds more generally) belonged to both his scientific and his political programmes. Bacon’s underlying aim in the work, the chapter argues, was the mastery of the winds—with how the winds might be controlled and put to human use and improvement, and with how the threat of natural disaster that they otherwise posed might therefore be averted. From discussions of the designs of ships’ sails to investigations of wind power, and reports of his own experiments into both wind and air, the subjects of the history all reflected that central aim. They were also, the chapter shows, intimately connected with his commercial and colonial interests, with what we might call his ‘mercantile imperialism’. They therefore reinforce that the Historia ventorum was, indeed, as much a civil and political project as a scientific one.
.

Angus Vine (University of Stirling)

Frozen : Journeys to the End of the World

Though anecdotal, one of the most vivid and tangible signs of the Little Ice Age which  affected Europe between the 14th century and the middle of the 19th century is the frozen Thames, which became a recurrent sight around the turn of the 17th century (1564, 1595, 1608, 1621, 1635). The frost turned the Thames into a “wonder” and the magnitude of the cold, and its customary companions (ice, snow, fog, tempestuous winds turning into storms and blizzards), turned what may be qualified as a natural hazard into a natural disaster, both at home and in far-away places. This paper proposes to  observe the frost in two radically different modes : the tragic mode of the Willoughby expedition in 1553-1554 in what turned out to be the first of a long list of Arctic disasters, and the carnivalesque and comical mode of The Great Frost : cold doings in London, published in 1608 and describing the Frost Fair on the Thames. The comparison highlights an unexpected proximity between the pamphlet and the genre of travel-writing: it shows how domestic and global concerns intersected in the local pamphlet and how the frost became the natural territory of British imperial expansion. The apocalyptic description of the frost highlights the ambivalence of the North which is both a living hell, the land of the dead, of silence and agony, and yet holds the promise of heaven on an economic level with its natural resources, and also more mystically as the country of eternal light.

Sophie Lemercier-Goddard (IHRIM, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon)