Enfilade

Just out from SVEC (formerly Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), available from the Voltaire Foundation:

Laura Auricchio, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook and Giulia Pacini, eds., Invaluable Trees: Cultures of Nature, 1660-1830 — SVEC 2012:08 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2012), 360 pages, ISBN 9780729410489, £65 / €95 / $110.

Trees and tree products have long been central to human life and culture, taking on intensified significance during the long eighteenth century. In this interdisciplinary volume, contributors trace changes in early modern theories of resource management and ecology across European and North American landscapes, and show how different and sometimes contradictory practices were caught up in shifting conceptions of nature, social identity, physical health and moral wellbeing.

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C O N T E N T S

Introduction
• Laura Auricchio — Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook and Giulia Pacini, Invaluable trees

I. Arboreal Lives
• Hamish Graham — ‘Alone in the forest’? Trees, charcoal and charcoal burners in eighteenth-century France
• J. L. Caradonna — Conservationism avant la lettre,? Public essay competitions on forestry and deforestation in eighteenth-century France
• Paula Young Lee — Land, logs and liberty: the Revolutionary expansion of the Muséum d’histoire naturelle during the Terror
• Peter Mcphee — ‘Cette anarchie dévastatrice’: the légende noire of the French Revolution
• Paul Elliott — Erasmus Darwin’s trees
• Giulia Pacini — At home with their trees: arboreal beings in the eighteenth-century French imaginary

II. Strategic Trees
• Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook — The vocal stump: the politics of tree-felling in Swift’s ‘On cutting down the old thorn at Market Hill’
• Michael Guenther — Tapping nature’s bounty: science and sugar maples in the age of improvement
• Meredith Martin — Bourbon renewal at Rambouillet
• Susan Taylor-Leduc — Assessing the value of fruit trees in the marquis de Fontanes’s poem Le Verger
• Elizabeth Hyde — Arboreal negotiations, or William Livingston’s American perspective on the cultural politics of trees in the Atlantic world
• Lisa Ford — The ‘naturalisation’ of François André Michaux’s North American sylva: patriotism in early American natural history

III. Arboreal Enlightenments
• Tom Williamson — The management of trees and woods in eighteenth-century England
• Steven King — The healing tree
• Nicolle Jordan — ‘I writ these lines on the body of the tree’: Jane Barker’s arboreal poetics
• Waltraud Maierhofer — Goethe and forestry
• Paula R. Backscheider — Disputed value: women and the trees they loved
• Aaron S. Allen — ‘Fatto di Fiemme’: Stradivari’s violins and the musical trees of the Paneveggio

Summaries
Bibliography
Index

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Laura Auricchio is Associate Professor of Art History and Chair of Humanities at The New School in New York. Her current research addresses Franco-American cultural exchanges in the Age of Revolution.
Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She studies the history of environmental ethics and early modern representations of trees and forests.
Giulia Pacini is Associate Professor of French at The College of William & Mary. Her current research focuses on the political and material significance of trees in early modern France.