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How did early modern women imagine themselves in relation to the natural world? How did they think – and write – about non-human nature: land, plants, minerals, animals? How did the evolving scientific culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries impact ideas about nature – and the nature of women? Remaining attentive to the many valences of the terms “nature” and “natural,” this graduate seminar will consider questions of gender, genre, and the environmental imagination in a selection of texts by and about women in early modern Italy, including Gaspara Stampa, Isabella Andreini, Tullia d’Aragona, and Moderata Fonte. In addition to close readings of works of poetry, pastoral, and natural philosophy, we will consider how contemporary ecocritical and ecofeminist theory might illuminate these texts in new ways. Some familiarity with Italian recommended.