https://at-ceu.studyguide.timeedit.net/modules/UGST4258?type=COREBefore the modern era the things of Nature were promiscuously polysemic, and Nature's adepts often sought 'the agreement and disagreement of things' via allegory and metaphor. In a world permeated with meaning, the human body could also connect microcosm and macrocosm. It was mainly in or around the seventeenth century that natural history began restricting the referential scope of the objects of sensory experience, while also confining itself to more literal readings of authoritative texts invoking those same objects. Soon we came to see Nature (to borrow from lexicographer Samuel Johnson) as the state or operation of the material world, the constitution or regular course of things, or simply the properties that discriminate one thing from another. Moreover, in Johnson's eighteenth century, Culture was not a metaphysical counterpart to 'the hard tenacious Nature of our Earth,' but merely the farmer's art of improvement, 'bringing land into Culture from a state of Nature.' In our own day, of course, the historian relies heavily on far more expansive senses of Nature and Culture to build complex narratives of material structure and human agency. We will start this course with the assumption that tracking these gradual historical shifts in major concepts and practices across the modern era can play a role in understanding the global scale of humanity's present dilemmas. This course is not a conventional survey of the history of modern science, nor does it qualify as global environmental history. We will instead select moments from the former that have helped create conditions of possibility for the latter. Our aim is to study historically the rise of some of the characteristically modern forms of knowledge that have fed into the uneasy construction of truly global sciences. The recent coinage of 'the Anthropocene' has sparked productive debates across the disciplines, yet its capaciousness also challenges the very function of history as a discipline. Does the Anthropocene stand for the late stage of a grand unified theory of historical explanation increasingly driven by knowledge from the natural sciences? Or is it an invitation to reconfigure humanist concepts at a historical moment when humans have become unwitting agents of geological change? How did we move from Nature to 'the environment'? Our task will be to trace how various forms of scientific knowledge have contributed to new conceptualizations since the seventeenth century.