Contents

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. List of Illustrations vii
4. Acknowledgements ix
5. Introduction: Theologies, Economies and Ecologies of the River 1
6. Part I Conceptualising the River
7. 1. Rivers of Milk, Honey, Tears and Treasures: Mapping Salvation in Early Modern English Devotional Poetry 21
8. 2. ‘Plenteous Rivers’: Waterways as Resources, Threats and the Heart of the Community in Early Modern England 42
9. 3. Rivers and Contested Territories in the Works of Shakespeare 61
10. Part II Writing the River
11. 4. The Navigation of the Trent and William Sampson’s The Vow-Breaker (1636) 83
12. 5. Ship of Fools and Slow Boat to Hell: The Literary Voyages of the Gravesend Barge 101
13. 6. Rivers, Monstrosity and National Identity in Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler 124
14. Part III Rivers and Money
15. 7. ‘Your Innes and Alehouses Are Brookes and Rivers’: John Taylor and Free-flowing Rivers of Ale 143
16. 8. The Rose and the Riverside 168
17. 9. ‘As Water Mill, Made Rags and Shreds to Sweate’: Fluvial Bodies and Fluminous Geographies 187
18. Part IV Ecocritical Approaches
19. 10. ‘Insatiable [Gourmandize] Thus All Things Doth Devour’: Reading the Threat of Human Greed along the Rivers of Early Modern England 211
20. 11. Powtes, Protest and (Eco)politics in the English Fens 231
21. 12. Shakespeare’s Waterways: Premonitions of an Environmental Collapse 250
22. Conclusions: Rivers of Life and Death 269
23. Notes on Contributors 273
24. Index 277