Nature and Ecologies of Kind in Early Modern England.

Abstract

Engaging kind as one of the period’s organizing concepts, this dissertation explores the role it played within hierarchical schematics of nature. Because nature was frequently portrayed as a system that ranked its kinds according to their presumed virtue, ideologies of kind could be invoked both to reinforce customs believed to correspond to natural order and to justify the marginalization of “lesser” kinds. But I propose that the polyvalence and polysemy of “kind” as well as the culture’s impulse to classify its kinds prompted some to think critically about the processes by which kinds came into existence. Analyzing texts and performances from the late 16th century up until 1674, when John Milton published his second edition of Paradise Lost, I argue that certain works portray such processes as simultaneously natural, artificial, and social. Consequently, these works allowed early moderns not only to imagine alternative “orders of nature” but also to evaluate the basis of their culture’s often-naturalized identity categories, which the period registered as kinds. Throughout the project, I focus on how literary experiments with various senses of “kind” concern a particular nexus of identity categories—rank, race, sex, gender, and species—as I move among early modern dictionaries, treatises, William Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen, Lady Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, John Fletcher’s The Island Princess, and John Milton’s Comus, “Epitaphium Damonis,” Tetrachordon, and Paradise Lost. At the same time that my project examines early modern articulations of nature, then, it offers a way to investigate how ideologies of kind informed the diverse identities accessible to early moderns, what the period’s identity categories had in common, and the dynamics that developed among them.