Du Bartas Responding to Morton’s Milton : A Bodily Route to the Ecological Thought

Abstract

In The Ecological Thought (2012), Timothy Morton calls us to recognize the interconnectedness of all things by rethinking the relationship between cosmic and local. He points to Raphael’s speech to Adam in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which compares Earth to the infinite cosmos, as an example of this ecological thought. An analogous cosmic viewpoint occurs in Guillaume du Bartas’s La Sepmaine (1578). This hexameron both highlights and complicates ecocriticism’s applicability to early modern texts. Whereas Milton’s text responds to Morton’s call by scaling Earth in relation to the macrocosmic, Du Bartas’s does the opposite: it scales the cosmic to the hyperlocal—the observer’s body. This earlier work thus offers a converse avenue by which to arrive at the ecological thought.