Organic Supplements: Bodies and Things of the Natural World, 1580–1790

By Miriam Jacobson, Julie Park, Rebecca Laroche and 7 more

From the hair of a famous dead poet to botanical ornaments and meat pies, the subjects of this book are dynamic, organic artifacts. A cross-disciplinary collection of essays, Organic Supplements examines the interlaced relationships between natural things and human beings in early modern and eighteenth-century Europe. The material qualities of things as living organisms—and things that originate from living organisms— enabled a range of critical actions and experiences to take place for the people who wore, used, consumed, or perceived them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Nov 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9780813944951

Book preview

Organic Supplements

Organic Supplements

Bodies and Things of the Natural World, 1580–1790

EDITED BY Miriam Jacobson and Julie Park

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2020 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2020

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Jacobson, Miriam Emma, editor. | Park, Julie, editor.

Title: Organic supplements : bodies and things of the natural world, 1580–1790 / edited by Miriam Jacobson and Julie Park.

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020007867 (print) | LCCN 2020007868 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813944937 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780813944944 (paperback) | ISBN 9780813944951 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Nature in literature. | Human ecology in literature. | European literature—History and criticism. | Human ecology.

Classification: LCC PN48 .O57 2020 (print) | LCC PN48 (ebook) | DDC 809/.9336—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020007867

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020007868

Cover art: Apollo and Daphne, Jean-Etienne Liotard, 1736. Drawing after Lorenzo Bernini’s marble group in the Galleria Borghese, Rome. (Gift of Prof. J. W. R. Tilanus on behalf of his wife, Mrs. J. V. Tilanus-Liotard, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Process and Connection

Julie Park and Miriam Jacobson

Part I. Inscription and Incorporation

Feather, Flourish, and Flow: Handwriting’s Organic Technology

Julie Park

The Flower of Ointments and Early Modern Transcorporeality

Rebecca Laroche

The Paris Opéra as a Vibrating Body: Feeling Pygmalion’s Kiss

Kevin Lambert

Part II. Interface and Merger

Gorgonick Spirits: Myth, Figuration, and Mineral Vivency in the Writings of Thomas Browne

Jessica Wolfe

Things with Kid Gloves

Lynn Festa

Vegetable Loves: Botanical Enthrallment in Early Modern Poetry

Miriam Jacobson

Part III. Vitality and Decay

Knowing the World through Rococo Ornamental Prints

Michael Yonan

Fingers in the Pie: Baked Meats, Adultery, and Adulteration

Diane Purkiss

Milton’s Hair

Jayne Lewis

Afterword: Virtuous Properties of the Organic Supplement

Julia Reinhard Lupton

Notes on Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

This collection would not exist without the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. It was at the Folger where we met as fellowship recipients and began the collaboration that led to the creation of this edited volume. We are indebted to Angie Hogan, our editor, for never steering our project in the wrong direction. We are also grateful to our external reviewers for giving the constructive criticism and encouragement that made this collection stronger. Several colleagues helped this project grow in significant ways: George Boulukos, Holly Dugan, Wendy Beth Hyman, Sujata Iyengar, Aaron Kunin, and Brad Pasanek. Finally, we wish to thank our contributors, whose talent and good will made this project a source of many pleasures and wonders.

Organic Supplements

Introduction

Process and Connection

Julie Park and Miriam Jacobson

In our time, the material objects on which we rely to perform our day-to-day tasks, such as handheld technological devices for communication, are not usually made of natural materials, though they fulfill our practical needs in a fashion that seems organic for the fluidity with which they do so. The fact that a similarly functioning tool from the early modern period—an erasable tablet, commonplace book, or pocket diary—was made purely of natural materials suggests that altogether different relationships were in play between humans and the natural world, those in which humans and the natural world engaged in more sustained, interactive, and quotidian relationships with one another than today. This interactivity, in which nature responds to humans and humans respond to nature, can be discerned in the example of erasable tablets, in use from antiquity to the nineteenth century. On one hand, the pliancy of the beeswax used in erasable tablets affords human acts of record keeping and erasure. On the other hand, humans themselves must modify their actions when facing the limitations of a natural material, such as when the wax loses its viscosity and resists inscription.

Many modern supplements remain detached from the body until they are subsumed by it, like vitamins—those organic supplements of contemporary life—that are kept in a separate container and can be taken out, ingested, and dissolved internally. But the natural objects that we are calling the organic supplement from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries occupied an intimate position in relationship to the human body and its movements and needs. In doing so they remained in flux as vital entities. For example, wigs, which were commonly worn, transformed the bodies of their wearers; at the same time, the material of these wigs—human or animal hair, caterpillar silk—was thought to remain alive during these periods.¹ In this case and in the many others featured in this collection, the organic supplement was situated janiform, at the meeting and departure points of the natural and the artificial and the person, animal, or thing.1p2

This collection appropriates for its title and conceptual framework a name used for contemporary culture’s pill-sized nutrients intended to compensate for dietary deficiencies or enhance general nutrition. Touting the superiority of ingredients that are natural rather than synthetic and free of pesticides and other toxic materials, the organic supplements available on today’s vitamin market promise the promotion of health for the individual and the environment. The choice to adopt the categorical term of present-day organic supplements for this collection is admittedly a playful one, yet it recognizes more serious transhistorical connections between a consumer product of late capitalist society and the objects, materials, and systems of belief of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries that underlie it. One of these connections is the notion that the use or perception of an entity derived from nature will create changes that are as significant to the human subject as they are to the environment from which the natural entity derives. Thus, for this collection, the term organic supplement does not so much dwell on the fact that human subjects are being supplemented but rather on the fact that humans are integrating organic elements into their functions and practices, much as they are doing the same, avowedly for much worse ends, by inserting their human functions and practices into the natural world.

The years represented in this volume, 1580 to 1790, comprise a period in which the idea of the individual person came into sharper definition. Though the terms and the constituents of what made a person a person changed from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, one factor remained consistent: the increased tendency toward reflectiveness about personhood. To have a notion of the supplement, of what augments, extends, or enhances the person, is to have a notion of what individual personhood means in the first place. Whether through self-fashioning, changes in private property laws, or philosophical notions of the self as articulated by the likes of Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, the boundaries of personhood achieved greater definition from the late sixteenth century to the late eighteenth. At the same time, reflections on the relationships—the continuities and differences—between person, animal, plant, and thing became more prominent, as exemplified in the works of Buffon and La Mettrie, for instance.² Challenging traditional historical frameworks that treat the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as discontinuous with the eighteenth century, this collection brings the two traditionally separate periods together to show how they shared a conceptual history of the organic supplement. This history reveals that from the sixteenth century through the eighteenth, aesthetic and scientific discourses energetically explored and questioned the relationships between material things and nature, as well as between natural and human worlds.

The words organic and supplement point to the conceptual terminology that was already recognized and used in the period that concerns this collection, as well as an earlier one. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the evolution of the word organic encapsulates a fluid relationship between humans and nature and between nature and objects. First used to describe bodily organs performing vital functions (the jugular vein, c. 1400; bodily tissue, c. 1500), the word expanded beyond the body in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to include objects and instruments utilized by the body (cognate with organum and organ), both abstract and concrete (a metaphorical instrument or a means to an end, c. 1500; relating to a musical instrument or technique, c. 1631).³

Thus, when we examine organic supplements we are discussing both material fashioned from living matter in the modern sense of the word and, in the early modern sense, material objects serving as instruments or vehicles for thought, energy, and sound and as bodily organs composed of vital tissue. As early as the late fifteenth century and throughout the seventeenth, an organ could mean the voice and human speech as well as a musical or surgical instrument.⁴ A philological approach to the organic in the early modern context reveals that the word has contained a counterintuitive seeming admixture of technology and life force. The idea of the organ or the organic thing as a conduit for energy, vitality, sound, speech, and thought unites these multiple meanings.

Very early uses of organ suggest a person who acts as an intermediary as well as an instrument with which one works. This sense of organ as mediator and instrument continues through the eighteenth century, as Julie Park reveals in her analysis of eighteenth-century writing as an interplay of human and animal bodies (hand and quill) mediated by writing technique. Such interplay emerges in the spaces of the flourishing penmanship manual as well as the real and fictionally conjured handwritten letter. For Park, the arresting image of the actively writing hand grasping a quill pen invests epistolary fiction with emotional energy and material verisimilitude, and writing itself becomes invested with the power to exchange organic (that is, organ-related) sensory functions, making the letters and words on the page flourish—blossom—and dance with vital movement in their function as supplements for bodily presence.⁵

Supplement is the organic’s other half in our conceptual frame. In their original usages, the terms overlap, yet supplement is a term whose applications are more far-reaching. In its definition as a thing (occasionally a person) added to make good a deficiency or as an enhancement; an addition or continuation to remedy or compensate for inadequacies, the word was used in diverse contexts through the early modern period, from law and religion to cartography.⁶ In addition, supplement was used for print documents (it is still used this way today) that extended or completed any work, for military reinforcements of additional soldiers, and for legal oaths that confirmed otherwise inadmissible or inconclusive evidence.⁷ Certainly, the broad reach of its early modern usage to denote that which is added or the action itself of adding to a prior form in order to enhance it or compensate for a lack therein indicates the capaciousness of supplement as a categorical term and concept. In contrast, although prosthesis has become a fashionable and widely applied critical term in cultural and literary studies, its actual usage in the early modern period was far more limited, arising only in specific technical contexts. It has pertained since 1550 to grammatical insertion or a putting of one letter to another, as John Smith puts it in The Mysterie of Rhetorick Unveil’d (1673) and, only since 1706, a replacement for a defective or absent part of the body.⁸

Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, human and animal bodies came to be perceived and described more closely according to their physical adaptability, flexibility, and suppleness. Indeed, in sixteenth-century English, supplements could also be supple: Philip Stubbes uses supplement to indicate physical pliability: theater (and by extension whoredome) consumeth the moisture and supplement of the body.⁹ Therefore, an early understanding of supplement itself contained associations with the elasticity and flexibility that the word supple indexes.¹⁰ Prior to the seventeenth century, supple referred to pliant objects, internal organs, actions, and volition but not specifically to human and animal bodies. We interpret early modern organic supplements not only as physical replacements and enhancements as the term was used in the periods we examine but also as yielding, malleable, and supple things that dramatize in miniature the reciprocal relationship between humans and the natural world that the essays in this volume examine.

Scholars might be most immediately familiar with the theoretical concept of the supplement through Jacques Derrida’s chapter on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ". . . That Dangerous Supplement . . . ," in Of Grammatology. Arising in his commentary on Rousseau’s attitude that writing is an agent that destroys presence even as it attempts to reconstruct it, the supplement in Derrida’s terminology is a rich figure for this double bind because its very danger has to do with how it unsettles Nature itself, as well as what is natural. Incontrovertibly, "Nature does not supplement itself at all; Nature’s supplement does not proceed from Nature, it is not only inferior to but other than Nature."¹¹ Speech is natural or at least the natural expression of thought, but writing is supplemental to it for it is added to it, adjoined, as an image or representation.¹²

Most suggestive in Derrida’s explanation is not just that writing is avowedly not natural as a supplement but also, as a supplement, an adjoined image or representation, it traffics in the imagination: It diverts the immediate presence of thought to speech into representation and the imagination.¹³ Derrida’s analysis of the supplement, adjoined to his commentary on The Confessions, the memoir of a prominent eighteenth-century intellectual figure, Rousseau, portrays the supplement as a dangerous and spurious linguistic construct directly conducive to the workings of the imagination. How, then, can we read entities operating as such with the origins, markers, and substance of the organic, and as material things? If Derrida’s supplement defines itself against nature, what happens when the supplement is itself of nature?

The work that philosopher Andy Clark has done to emphasize the coalitions that humans make with nonbiological entities, such as tools, has renewed critical fascination with the supplement and the possibilities of supplemented subjectivity that Derrida introduced earlier, taking them into the realm of cognitive processes.¹⁴ While Clark mentions the old technologies of the artist’s sketch pad and pen and paper, the devices for extending our minds that most concern him are technologies contemporary to his time, including digital cameras, robotic cameras, and cochlear implants. Thus, Clark’s supplements are the inorganic things—made of plastic, steel, fiber optics—that normally come to mind when we think of tools and prosthetic devices. His technological tools do not just form coalitions but leak into our minds and selves, rendering humans into soft selves that represent our true nature. That is, we are cognitively enhanced and rehabilitated by various tools that merge with both our bodies and minds and constitute biotechnological hybrids.¹⁵

But a look back toward historical periods that precede Clark’s twenty-first-century landscape reveals that a wide array of tools and objects existed for effecting vital functions of everyday life made of materials that were still alive, originated from living sources, or occupied a status between natural and artificial. The quill pens, vibrating strings of musical instruments, herbal ointments, and kid gloves of this collection powerfully indicate how the tools of Clark’s soft selves both exist in and are constituted by history, and how nature itself is a central feature of that history. Scholars of the Renaissance and eighteenth century have long been interested in investigating the world of things and material culture.¹⁶ How might we rethink the relationships between humans and the material world that have been at the center of scholarly inquiry in the humanities and social sciences for at least the past twenty-five years when we notice that nature forms an integral feature of those relationships? Thinking through this question is one of the aims of this collection. Might we consider that there is a history of humans being supplemented by entities from nature, fusing with them to become "bioorganic hybrids"?

Clark posits that the soft self, with its control-sharing coalition of processes that are at once neural, bodily and technological, has an ongoing drive to tell a story, to paint a picture in which ‘I’ am the central player.¹⁷ Yet this collection posits that the story of the supplemented, soft self is richer and has greater historical and ontological range than this when we turn our attention to its manifestations in a much earlier time period. To focus on notions and examples of organic things that supplement human selves throughout early modern Europe is to focus on process, which in itself is an integral feature of stories themselves.¹⁸ In stories, things happen and events take place, just as they do in the cultural drama of things of nature turned into objects of use and absorbed or stretched and penetrated by human bodies and their parts, whether as flowers turned into healing ointments or as animal skin fashioned into kid leather gloves. Rather than the I who triumphs as the central player in the stories that Clark’s soft self tells, the supplemented selves of our collection reveal human subjects whose glory is continually questioned by their reliance on the natural things they reach for to make themselves whole.

At the same time, the stories we tell in this collection are not just about human attachments to organic things but about how attendant cultural-historical values conceive, define, maintain, and illuminate the attachments of these things and their nature. In becoming attached to humans and integrated into their lives, these apparently ancillary organic things undergo metamorphic transformations and become incorporated deep into human bodies and the bowels—the organs—of the cultural unconscious, as in Diane Purkiss’s essay about the cultural practices of making and consuming meat pies in Renaissance England. As such, organic things are rendered into the made things of pies filled with once organic material, coming to adorn the surfaces of such human settings as the banquet tables of feasts, then disappearing into human bodies, and resurfacing in the cultural imaginary. These resurfacings include anxieties about various containers for bodies and their corporeal insides, like so many covered pies, from those of the encoffined dead to those of bridal beds lodging women. The poetry, diary entries, and tales of the period serve as processing agents for these projections, recycling, repackaging, and reinterpreting them through different textual arrangements, participating in the organic process of creativity in doing so.

That these supplements have stories behind their displacements from their natural environments to human worlds is a natural function of organicism, for the organic, like organs themselves, is frequently defined by the connections it makes between itself and other entities, whether through acts of organization or through operating as tools for mediating human desires and the enactment of those desires, including cultural ones. A long dead poet’s carefully preserved hair might come not only to replace the lost poet himself but to serve as a physical embodiment of his poetry, as Jayne Lewis reveals in her essay Milton’s Hair, which returns to an understanding, prevalent in Milton’s own period, of organic as instruments or members of the body. Milton’s hair, even and especially long after his death, is both a living organ and an instrument, carrying and transferring Milton’s immortal poetic essence to those who saw or touched it, while at the same time interacting with and reshaping—one might say rebraiding—the cultural idea of Milton as author in fertile and nonnormative ways.

Connections are also formed between organisms when humans and animals discover shelter and forms of dwelling in the specific properties and features of the environment. Twentieth-century psychologist James J. Gibson supplies a critical vocabulary for the process by which these connections are made as a function of existing at all in an environmental medium. By construing the environment as a medium, Gibson conceives of it as a space made up of earth, air, or water through which animals, including humans, move and find their ground of perception and behavior.¹⁹ The environmental medium offers affordances, or offerings of nature that enable the animal to function physically: It affords respiration or breathing, it permits locomotion; it can be filled with illumination so as to permit vision; it allows detection of vibrations and detection of diffusing emanations.²⁰ Operative in Gibson’s conception of the affordance is the way it posits a model of intersubjectivity. As he puts it, an affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjective-objective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. . . . It is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points in both directions, to the environment and to the observer.²¹

Such claims as the notion that the affordances themselves are invariant, remaining strikingly constant throughout the whole evolution of animal life run somewhat counter to the historically textured accounts of environmentally derived things in this collection. Yet the exquisite attentiveness to the materiality and interactivity of environmental objects in their affordances supplies an important theoretical model for the collection’s wide-ranging examinations of organic supplements. For instance, similar to Gibson’s observations about the affordances of air when noting that it offers a better medium for locomotion than water because it offers less resistance, Thomas Browne, the seventeenth-century English naturalist and physician who features in Jessica Wolfe’s essay, finds a worthy point of focus in the way salt spirits have a power to congeal and coagulate unctuous bodies.²² Whereas Gibson is more invested in understanding how the affordances of environmental elements, spaces, and objects enable animals to take specific actions, Browne fixates on the knowledge and information that studying the mutability of minerals might yield. And yet both evince the attitude that the details and qualities of environmental features and the materials of which they are made offer a means for understanding how and why certain fundamental processes and actions take place as a function of existing in the material world.

Taking Gibson further, Tim Ingold’s notion of the mutual permeability and binding of the earth and sky demonstrates not just that the environment can be inhabited but that the indissoluble connection between its most fundamental spatial components allows the objects on which they settle to grow and become one mass, turning the surface of the earth into a vaguely defined zone of admixture and intermingling.²³ For this reason, wind and weather serve as mediums for the substances of leaf litter and detritus, mosses and lichens, stones and boulders to turn something as seemingly straightforward as the ground of a forest into a more or less impenetrable mass of tangled undergrowth that is split by cracks and crevasses, threaded by tree roots, and interspersed with swamps and marshes overgrown with rafts of vegetation. The forest ground, in other words, and the organic materials that settle onto it turn into mutual extensions for each other, with the ground an environmental substrate for new inscriptions from nature. Distinguishing which element is supplemental to the other is impossible, for a mutual permeability and binding takes place as a natural consequence of being alive. The very nature of living beings themselves, which entails processes of respiration, of breathing in and out, is what allows them to bind the medium with substance in forging their own growth and movement through the world.²⁴ In the scenario depicted by Ingold, nature and its different constituents are in ineluctable interaction with each other, producing a generative form of friction that allows new growth to emerge that did not exist before.

Ingold’s notion of the weather world is one that recalls the unexpected new creations borne out of the juxtapositions between objects of nature in aesthetic environments, not just the natural ones of forests and other terrestrial environments.²⁵ Here, a word used by eighteenth-century German architect Friedrich August Krubsacius for rococo design—mishmash—resonates with Ingold’s revelation of the purportedly smooth and coherent forest ground as a vital jumble of various things.²⁶ The mock rococo cartouche that Krubsacius had created for him to make his point that rococo decorative prints embody an undignified mishmash of things includes representations of reeds and straw, bones, pottery shards, shavings, feather brooms, wilted flowers, shattered shells, rags, feathers, wood shavings, etc.²⁷ As Michael Yonan explains in his essay, Krubsacius appears on the surface simply to deride rococo ornament for tricking the eye with its elegant appearance of formal and aesthetic coherence when in fact it is composed of random pieces of garbage. Yet the critic’s derision also sheds light on the way rococo art promotes awareness of a quite serious problem about the process of knowing the world sensorially, the way in which the viewing subject engages in art as a conduit to accessing nature.²⁸

In its very status as ornament, rococo adornment is supplementary—it adds to what already exists and supplies artificially the presence of what is absent, structurally as well as ontologically, especially as representations of natural and man-made things, from shells and feathers to silk ribbons, in different materials from the original (engraved ink on paper for bones or wood for grape clusters). It also calls into question the very points where discrete things become connected to and supplemented by each other, becoming an organic, undifferentiated whole. In doing so, rococo’s seductively strange and playful forms implicitly demand the viewer to consider a question central to philosophy of the same time period: How does mind apprehend matter? How do blendings of materials from nature and those from art challenge such perceptual apprehensions? Looking at a rococo cartouche through Ingold’s perspective, one might view it not just as aesthetic representation but as a supplemental environment in itself, enclosing the viewer with its forest of organically entangled forms that cover the surfaces of the world with multiple textures. The perceptual explorations prompted by the cartouche’s mishmash environment anticipate Ingold’s notion that perceiving the textures of things in their multiplicity and realizing the material basis of their bonds with each other is an unfolding occurrence rather than a fixed condition, is being alive to life itself. Thus, as a living thing, the environment does not so much exist as it occurs and unfolds, like the objects of the natural world.²⁹ And rather than discerning the unfolding nature of natural objects, one "perceives with them. Indeed, to do so is to join with them in the material flows and movements contributing to their—and our—ongoing formation.³⁰ To perceive with the objects of nature is to see and describe the properties of their materials, which in turn is to tell the stories of what happens to them as they flow, mix and mutate."³¹ In their focus on the processes and connections through which natural objects become part of the flow of early modern life and its cultural representational systems and discourses, the essays in this collection perform this work of storytelling.

The process of discovering how one—whether a human, animal, or plant—might interact with the affordances of environmental features to allow certain actions and bindings to take place is in itself a narrative, as well as a transformation of beings and environmental objects alike.³² The uprightness and firmness of a tree trunk, for instance, affords the architectural support for a vine to move in an upward manner too, making its way around the tree base until it reaches the exposure to a light source it needs in order to survive. The vine’s movement toward the sky by way of the tree trunk is a journey, and its relationship with the tree support is one of winding contact and attachment. Another element of the process by which the vine becomes attached to the tree is the mutual transformation that takes place for vine and tree; while the vine changes its shape into a twisting and curling one in using the tree trunk as the medium, the tree itself becomes a part of the vine. So closely does it attach itself to the tree’s base that removing the vine without damaging the tree would be difficult. As Miriam Jacobson’s essay on the botanical embrace will show in the context of seventeenth-century lyric, the vine is rendered an object of human fantasies about erotic intimacy with plants and the possibility of transforming into one. In doing so, a human might not only live out the vine’s stories of attachment and ensnarement but also turn into an entity like the tree trunk, allowing the human body to be overtaken by the vine as its tool for growth. William Hogarth’s account of how the idea for the original Corinthian column derived from dock-leaves growing up against a basket presents another example of the way in which nature’s supplementation of preexisting objects, whether from nature or humans, provides rich food for the creation of beauty not just in literature but also aesthetic patterns in design.³³

Rather than mapping out master structures that illustrate the dynamic interconnections between humans, nature, and the environment, we wish to shed light on the historical concepts and terms that denote systems of interrelations already inhering in the early modern period, from late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cosmologies to eighteenth-century vitalism’s cooperation of forces.³⁴ At the same time, we do not shun the term environment, a move made recently by literary critics.³⁵ Environment is a lousy term, Sean Silver writes, citing Michel Serres for exposing its fallacy.³⁶ Yet the term environment is far more varied and complex in the ways it has been used in both historical and theoretical literature than those who reject the term recognize.³⁷ Ingold has shown, for instance, how the environment is a vital locus of agentive drives and properties that not only act on humans but interact with them. And the term, tied to the physical state of being enclosed or environed, insists on the spatial and embodied conditions in which humans and nature interrelate with each other, a sense missing in ecology.

Nathan Bailey’s etymological dictionary from 1775, presenting the word fully constituted as environment as opposed to the still more common environ, defines it as an encompassing round.³⁸ Indeed, the element of the round emerged earlier in Samuel Johnson’s dictionary of 1756, which defines environ as a function of explaining the meaning of the word surround: to environ; to encompass; to enclose all sides.³⁹ The concatenation of round, surround, and environ evokes the phrase in the round, which in turn denotes the state of full dimensionality, with all sides of an item represented, like a sculpture or a theater design wherein the audience surrounds the stage from at least three sides, as in Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. When Julia Lupton considers the idea of theatrical experience as an environmental one that invites the management of social relations in her recent book Shakespeare Dwelling, she writes that theater is a testing ground for such explorations, since it assembles objects and persons in an experimental zone fraught with the possibilities of directionality.⁴⁰ So too do environmental