Eleven essays invite us to rethink not only what constitutes an environment but also where the environment ends and selfhood begins. The essays examine the dynamic and varied mediations early modern writers posited between microcosm and macrocosm, ranging from discourses on the ecology of passions to striking examples of distributed cognition.

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors Introduction: Inhabiting the Body, Inhabiting the World; G.Sullivan & M.Floyd-Wilson Spongy Brains and Material Memories; J.Sutton Marvell's Amazing Garden; M.Thomas Crane The Souls of Animals: John Donne's Metempsychosis and Early Modern Natural History; E.D.Harvey Affective Irony: Toward an Emotional Logic of the Elizabethan Stage; S.Mullaney Inconstancy: Changeable Affections in Stuart Dramas of Contract; K.Rowe The East in British-American Writing: English Identity, John Smith's True Travels , and Severed Heads; J.Egan 'My liquid journey': The Frontispiece to Coryat's Crudities (1611); D.J.Baker Becoming the Landscape: The Ecology of the Passions in the Legend of Temperance; G.Kern Paster 'The Material Point of Poesy': Reading, Writing and Sensation in Puttenham's The Art of English Poesie K.Craik Spelling the Body; T.Pollard Humanist Habitats; Or, 'Eating Well' with Thomas More's Utopia ; J.Yates Index