Description
Book SynopsisHow the story of Noah's Flood was central to the development of a global environmental consciousness in early modern Europe. Winner, Morris D. Forkosch Prize, Journal of the History of IdeasMany centuries before the emergence of the scientific consensus on climate change, people began to imagine the existence of a global environment: a natural system capable of changing humans and of being changed by them. In After the Flood, Lydia Barnett traces the history of this idea back to the early modern period, when the Scientific Revolution, the Reformations, the Little Ice Age, and the overseas expansion of European empire, religion, and commerce gave rise to new ideas about nature, humanity, and their intersecting histories. Recovering a forgotten episode in the history of environmental thought, Barnett brings to light the crucial role of religious faith and conflict in the emergence of a global environmental consciousness. Following Noah's Flood as a popular topic of debate through lon
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction. A Natural History of Sin
Chapter One. Before the Flood: Gender, Embodied Sin, and Environmental Agency
Chapter Two. After the Flood: Biblical Monogenism, Global Migrations, and the Origins of Scientific Racism
Chapter Three. Protestant Climate Change: From Edenocene to Fallocene
Chapter Four. The Flood and the Apocalypse: Building the Republic of Letters
Chapter Five. Catholic Climate Change: Heritable Sin and Strategies of Toleration
Epilogue. The Flood Subsides
Notes
Index
