Lydia Barnett. After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe.

Abstract

After the Flood offers a rich and thought-provoking analysis of how the biblical account of a Universal Deluge became “a popular though controversial topic of long-distance intellectual exchange from the late sixteenth through the early eighteenth century” (7). Its five chapters take us on an exciting ride from Padua to Peru, from England to Switzerland, and back to Padua again, reconstructing the social and intellectual networks that debated Noah’s Flood as a “pivotal event in the intertwined histories of nature and humanity” (5). Drawing on printed and manuscript letters and a wide range of other sources, Lydia Barnett shows how the idea of a Universal Deluge not only enabled early modern Europeans to conceptualize environmental processes—and their own role in them—on a planetary rather than local scale but also carried an appealing irenic potential in the fragmented setting of post-Reformation Europe: “The Flood was a way of thinking about unity...