{"title":"Renascent Nature in the Ruins: Joachim du Bellay’s Antiquitez de Rome","authors":"V. Velázquez","doi":"10.5117/9789462985971_ch08","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Joachim du Bellay’s Les Antiquitez de Rome (1558) is traditionally read\n as a text about human-made culture: the grandeur and ruin of Rome.\n Nevertheless, through a moral condemnation of imperial Rome’s pride and\n its violent origins, Du Bellay describes the effects Rome’s fall had on the\n nonhuman landscape, thus inviting a re-evaluation of the relation between\n humans and nonhuman nature. His juxtaposition of the destructiveness of\n history’s blindness to nature with the landscape’s re-emergence from the\n ruined remains of Roman culture yields images that challenge us to rethink\n conservation in relation to a nature that changes over time, and which is\n inseparable from culture and its ruins, while at the same time redefining\n the traditional presupposition of what we categorize as ‘nature writing’.","PeriodicalId":180042,"journal":{"name":"Early Modern Écologies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2020-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Early Modern Écologies","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.5117/9789462985971_ch08","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Joachim du Bellay’s Les Antiquitez de Rome (1558) is traditionally read
as a text about human-made culture: the grandeur and ruin of Rome.
Nevertheless, through a moral condemnation of imperial Rome’s pride and
its violent origins, Du Bellay describes the effects Rome’s fall had on the
nonhuman landscape, thus inviting a re-evaluation of the relation between
humans and nonhuman nature. His juxtaposition of the destructiveness of
history’s blindness to nature with the landscape’s re-emergence from the
ruined remains of Roman culture yields images that challenge us to rethink
conservation in relation to a nature that changes over time, and which is
inseparable from culture and its ruins, while at the same time redefining
the traditional presupposition of what we categorize as ‘nature writing’.