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Poisoned towns and rivers, species extinctions, and now climate change have confirmed many times over how modern dreams of limitless growth combined with relentless technological exploitation have compromised planetary life at every level. In response to such degradation, the integrity of local place has been a major orientation for environmental ethics and criticism. The origins of localism are conventionally traced to late-eighteenth-and nineteenth-century critiques of urban industrialization, and Romanticism’s corresponding veneration for rural authenticity and wilderness spaces. Mid-twentieth-century environmentalism revived this ‘ethic of proximity’ in denouncing the release of pollutants and carcinogens into local soils, waters, and atmospheres by civil offshoots of military manufacturing and industrial agriculture. Those releases did not stay local, but soon penetrated regional water systems and wind patterns to become worldwide problems. Such networks of devastation continue to grow, especially in developing countries eager to mimic the worst aspects of Western consumer culture. In response to these developments, ecotheorists have partially revised locally focused models of environmental protection. Planetary threats such as rising global temperatures, melting polar ice sheets, and more intense storms have made it imperative to update the famous Sierra Club slogan and to act globally as well as locally. Localism has also been reshaped by conservation biology’s new recognition that geophysical disturbances and organic change are structural features of all healthy ecosystems. Within these more complicated ecological paradigms, the cultivation of relatively balanced and genuinely sustainable local relationships nonetheless remains an important conservationist worldview. In early modern England it was the leading life experience out of which responses to new environmental dangers were conceived. In this chapter I shall discuss Shakespeare’s representations of one of the three most significant of these threats—deforestation—in The Merry Wives of Windsor. (The other two, exploitative land-uses and gunpowder militarization, will be the subjects of Chapters 2 and 3 respectively). Early modern English writers and governments treated deforestation as a national problem, even though its impacts were concentrated mainly in the Midlands and the south-east.

This chapter studies the influence on Smith of his education and mentors (such as John Cheke) at Cambridge University. It traces his frequent recourse to the humanist genre of dialogue and his promotion of counsel and of conciliar government, the existence of which should limit monarchical power and prevent tyranny. It discusses Smith's plans for language reform, a reflection of his view that language, law, and religion were the three bands of commonweal; his intervention in the Edwardian Enclosure debates; and his treatise on Elizabeth I's marriage. Looking at both Smith's plans for the colonisation of Ireland and his psalm translations (composed in prison), it also argues that Smith's choice of medium (be it manuscript or print) reveals the ways in which he targeted the type of audience he required for the work in question.

This chapter examines why Chartism and other ‘urban’ movements failed to take hold in certain regions, but also how other forms of collective action, including agitation against enclosure of common land and the Swing riots of the early 1830s, show that rural areas were far from politically inactive. Luddites, Swing agitators and enclosure rioters enacted a defence of communal rights against privatisation and laissez-faire political economy. They fought for the vestiges of common rights but also the new rights of organised labour against the deskilling effects of mass capitalism in both industry and agriculture. Rural resistance involved embodied practices that transcended the divide between cultural and natural perceptions of the environment.

This chapter introduces composer Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), a polymath visionary who was the most prolific composer of plainchant and creator of the first musical “morality play.” It traces her enclosure at the Disibodenberg monastery with the pious Jutta of Sponheim at the age of twelve, her leadership of a community of Benedictine nuns, the startling vision that compelled her to begin documenting her visions when she was forty-two in her book Scivias, and interactions with her confessor Volmar, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, and Pope Eugenius III. Another important vision instructed her to leave Disibodenberg with her nuns and create a new community at Rupertsberg, on the Rhine River across from Bingen.

In this chapter, following his ontology that focuses on what it means to give an account of something, Levi R. Bryant not only defines building as a machine, but building as a void and an enclosure where architecture operates in, through and on it. After elaborating on his argument that all of being is composed of machines, calling this metaphysics or ontology ‘machine-oriented ontology’, he goes onto sketching the outlines of a machine-oriented architecture and the ways in which distributions of space operate on bodies, create subjectivities and form communities. He concludes by asking what a revolutionary enclosure would be to connect it with our ability to create enclosures that act upon us and potentially enhance our becoming and movement.

This chapter looks at what the primary evidence from the period between the reforms of the early ninth century and the 920s/30s tells us about the adequacy of the common narrative of women religious' disempowerment and descent into social and spiritual redundancy. Its aim is to take recent arguments about the risks of working with normative texts and the biased accounts of later commentators one step further, and probe, as much as is possible, realities of female religious life as they were experienced in the ninth and very early tenth centuries. It speculates on two phenomena. First, that monastic realities continued to be ‘ambiguous’ throughout the ninth century. And second, that women religious responded to growing limitations on their interactions with the outside world by reorganizing monastic space, cults of saints, and liturgical routines to underscore their community’s hstorical identity and continued relevance to society.

In Chapter III contains an explication Garcia’s model of objects as differentiators between that which they comprehend and that which comprehends them. Garcia’s model is then contrasted with other canonical theories in the new continental metaphysics, showing how a defining feature is the manner in which metaphysicians can be interpreted as responding to an enclosure paradox concerning metaphysical explanation. This allows the foregrounding of Garcia’s dialetheist paradoxico-metaphysics, and also one to see clearly how Garcia’s achievement should be interpreted alongside related meta-metaphysical developments by Graham Harman and Graham Priest, as well as other recent speculative philosophers such as Alain Badiou, Markus Gabriel, and Paul Livingston. In addition, it allows one to begin to appreciate the fact that Garcia is contributing to contemporary analytic metaphyics.

This chapter draws on a wide range of resources, from Parliamentary Acts (including Enclosure and Witchcraft Acts) to Old Bailey transcripts of the trial of Mary Squires and Elizabeth Canning. Surveying the cultural, social and political burdens placed upon the way of life which previously had sustained the gypsies, it establishes a context through which to read the works explored in the rest of the book. The various pressures on gypsy life considered here include (amongst others) industrialization, the decline in popular faith in alternative beliefs, and the way in which the gypsies' integral and necessary roles within the rural community are increasingly rendered obsolete. The chapter looks at texts by Mary Russell Mitford, Samuel Rogers, and John Clare, which exhibit these pressures in action, rather than attempting a straightforward history of the gypsies.

This chapter outlines the conservation management of Wytham Woods, both past and present. It first considers the conservation management of the area before 1900 when the nation's population became increasingly urban and the countryside was transformed into patches of fields and hedges. It describes the Enclosure Act of 1814 which introduced new structures of land ownership and use. It then investigates twentieth-century conservation methods that added the notion of protective management of species and habitats. Next, the chapter looks into the management position held by Oxford University and their execution of the requests of the ffennell estate. It tackles some issues regarding the conflicts between research and conservation and the promotion of public access.