Knowing, seeing, and transcending nature: Judaic holiness and the control of nature in early modern English literature and culture

In Knowing, Seeing, and Transcending Nature, I anatomize an incipient environmental ethos that emerges in early modern English literature and argue that many writers exploited the phenomenological flexibility of Old Testament holiness as they formed what we can call retrospectively an ecological consciousness. Understanding early modern England to be experiencing an environmental crisis, I suggest that writers turned to Judaism and Jewish concepts, especially holiness, as a diversionary strategy. Holiness functioned as a trope that afforded a convenient evasiveness, a way to meditate on the philosophical and biological problem of burgeoning pollution without assigning blame to any specific cause or environmental technology.;A second major claim I make in this project is that Old Testament holiness is a trope that well-represents early modern epistemological anxieties. The holiness trope is a way for writers to illustrate the contingencies of scientific knowledge, colonial exploration, and natural knowledge. The agricultural referents that are in the Torah helped early moderns formulate the ideology of a natural world as God had intended at creation. At the same time, holiness is a representation of God's evasiveness. My tripartite topoi---knowing, seeing, and transcending---are interlocking concepts (just as they are specific desires and forms of interacting with nature) that describe how early modern literature reflects the struggle of a culture trying to comprehend the consequences of its interventions in and alterations of nature.;I begin the project by examining the environmental import of Christian Hebraism, or the flowering of interest in Jewish texts and culture during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England and in continental Europe. This outline of the Protestant refraction of Judaism informs my investigation of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, and John Milton's Paradise Lost. Each of these texts incorporates dialectics of Jewish holiness to explore the limitations of epistemology. Similarly, these texts represent the era's progression from a whole-bodied physiology of knowing, to an epistemology that privileges human sight, and finally to a wholesale rejection of human sensory perception as a way to achieve transcendent understanding of God's order on earth.;KEYWORDS: holiness, Christian Hebraism, epistemology, ecocriticism, environmental crisis.