Afterword

The three articles gathered together here, which focus primarily on writers from early modern France, cut to the heart of contemporary critical debates about how we live with ourselves, the rest of humanity, and Planet Earth in the Anthropocene. One force of this particular incision of the past into the present is that the early modern authors are encouraged to employ their own terms, avoiding what Sara Miglietti calls in her introduction the "deforming lens of contemporary categories." As such, this concise cluster of studies provides some alternate (i.e. different yet related) histories and genealogies for thinking some of the biggest conceptual challenges of our times, especially the seemingly irresolvable oppositions between the particular and the universal, between the local and the global, and between determinism and probability.