ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book addresses various aspects of early modern environings in relation to social and political practice, discussing attempts to control and manipulate the physical world, the motives behind these interventions, and how people interpreted the ways in which the physical might or might not manifest the political. It also addresses the relationship between governing regimes and their environments through a re-reading of Jean Bodin's Six Books of the Commonwealth. The book describes a diverse range of sources from landmark works of 'climate theory' to local administrative records, court proceedings, and radical political texts, which provide a stronger grasp of the various ways in which people understood and negotiated their relationship to their environments. It traces how humoural and climatic theories found in Bodin and other Renaissance authors were deployed in a number of drainage schemes on French marshlands.
