Current PhD Student

Patricia Bond

Thesis Title:

‘‘Of this frail fabric…’: Paper Ecologies, Place and Displacement in Women’s Manuscript Poetry of the Seventeenth Century’

Supervisor:

Professor Helen Smith

Description:

My project, funded by WRoCAH, explores how women poets including Jane Cavendish, Lucy Hutchinson, Hester Pulter and Anne Southwell responded to the material and political ecologies they inhabited to create a uniquely localised ecopoetics, exposing concerns about damaged relationships between warring humans as well as fragile relationships between humans and nonhumans.

Alert to the wider context of early modern women's writing and the particularities of manuscript culture, including previously unacknowledged geographical and archival proximities, this project will examine the poets'; engagements with the landscapes nearest them. I will argue that through these poets’ early identification with presentiments of the Anthropocene, these women navigate roles as political and literary agents in the context of an early modern understanding of writing and the environment.

Twinning the larger concepts of the environment and the Anthropocene with a specific understanding of the places these poets lived and wrote opens a dialogue between the poetry and materiality of these under-researched manuscripts and twenty-first century environmental concerns extant in the same locations, revealing striking connections between early modern and contemporary anxieties around food culture, water insecurity and deforestation.

I will examine the manuscripts in their current locations, observing their decaying materials and the tensions between their preservation and circulation. I will argue that the networked ecologies of these pages allow for the distribution of words and bodies along lasting webs of connectivity against the normative poles of space and
time.