Introduction: An Environing of this Book

In the spring of 2013, we were invited to propose a possible session for the Shakespeare Association of America meeting in St. Louis for 2014. The SAA is an organization that, in addition to running paper panels at its annul conference, offers participants the opportunity to share work-in-progress through themed seminars. The two of us had been in conversation for some time about nonhumans, things, animal, vegetable, and mineral, medieval and renaissance, about questions of ecology, and how to craft nontraditional conversation and thinking spaces in which something unanticipated might unfold. We decided to collaborate to build a gathering that would bring together these interests, objects, and possibilities for eventuation. The title of the seminar we proposed was “Object-Oriented Environs in Early Modern England,” which took its cue from the philosophical movement called Object-Oriented Ontology (frequently abbreviated to OOO) in the hope of provoking a conversation about how early modernists, or humanists in general, parse the question of matter, of things. We called the collocation OOE @ SAA.