Participates in an intellectual history of ecology while prompting a re-evaluation of nature in the early modern period.

Peter Remien is an Associate Professor of English at Lewis-Clark State College, Idaho. His teaching and scholarship focuses on early modern English literature, with particular attention to economic and environmental approaches. His articles have appeared in a number of journals including Modern Philology, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Studies in Philology, the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Spenser Studies, and PMLA.

Introduction: oeconomy and ecology; 1. The oeconomy of nature in seventeenth-century England; 2. Penshurst's parasites: Ben Jonson and the art of bad housekeeping; 3. The school of beasts: human and animal dwellings in Viret and Marvell; 4. Divine husbandry: providence and oikonomia in the works of George Herbert; 5. Labors of luxury: John Milton, Thomas Burnet, and the nature of human labor; Epilogue: from economy to ecology.