Cold Tyranny and the Demonic North of Early Modern England
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A01=Anne Cotterill
Author_Anne Cotterill
Category=DSB
Category=N
early arctic travel
early modern climate
english poetry
environmental humanities
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
literary meteorology
Little Ice Age
political allegory
scientific revolution studies
seventeenth-century england
tyranny and winter symbolism
winter
Product details
- ISBN 9781041177104
- Weight: 620g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 01 Dec 2025
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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The seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were among the worst years of the Little Ice Age. This volume attends to English texts from this period to trace associations between wintry physical landscapes and an icy inner landscape of human cruelty and tyranny whose rigors promote the ultimate chill of rigor mortis. Sailors seeking a polar route to the East brought terrifying reports of northern icescapes, long popularly linked with the devil. Simultaneously, concerns about increasingly cold winters at home in Britain overlapped with increased scrutiny of kingship and the church and fear of tyranny from both. Such fears were reflected in ongoing struggles between king and Parliament during the period, leading to revolution and war. The binding power of ice and the power of northern winters to deface, kill, and bury life suggested the Fall’s human parallel to winter: cold-hearted humans as tyrannical winters who deal in death.
Anne Cotterill is Associate Professor Emerita at Missouri University of Science and Technology. She has published Digressive Voices in Early Modern English Literature (Oxford, 2004) and essays on the work of John Dryden, Andrew Marvell, and Elizabeth Isham.
