Mensch und "Umwelt" in der Literatur der Frühen Neuzeit

Eine Annäherung

Abstract

This article explores the possibilities of an ecocritical approach to early modern literature. To this end, it first discusses some fundamental contextual factors at the intersection of cultural history, intellectual history and environmental history, which define the pre-modern concept of nature and the relationship between early modern people and nature. In a second step, an ecocritical reading of early modern literature is then put forward for discussion on the basis of two specific textual examples from around 1500. One of these is Hans Sachs’s poetic Nuremberg City Praise (1530), the other is De iudicium Jovis, a Neo-Latin prose dialogue by Paul Niavis (Schneevogel), first published in 1495. Beyond the specific stylistic and aesthetic conventions employed by both texts—which stem from their affiliation with distinct poetic and discursive traditions rooted in the vernacular Middle Ages and humanism respectively—it is above all their respective perspectives on the relationship between humanity and nature that prove to be profoundly different. Thus, the narrative discourse of Sachs’s proverbial poem consistently focuses on the city as an anthropogenic habitat founded on the use of natural resources, to which the allegorical natural setting of the forest, sketched out at the beginning, relates exclusively in a symbolic frame of reference. With regard to mining, however, Niavis’s dialogue offers a more nuanced, essentially pessimistic and critical reflection on humanity’s exploitation of nature, which also gives nature – in the form of ‘Mother Earth’ – a voice of its own, thereby countering, even if unwittingly, the rigorously anthropocentric understanding of nature prevalent at the time.