PhD | ‘Envoys of the Environment: Elemental Beings, Humans and the Natural World in Early Modern Thought’ – Tjalling Janssen

PhD | ‘Envoys of the Environment: Elemental Beings, Humans and the Natural World in Early Modern Thought’ – Tjalling Janssen
PhD candidate: Tjalling Janssen
Institution: University of Amsterdam
Supervisors: Peter Forshaw, Wouter Hanegraaff

The main focus of Tjalling Janssen’s PhD project are elemental beings. With roots that go back to antiquity and the medieval period, elemental beings as a fourfold grouping of undines (water), sylphs (air), gnomes (earth) and salamanders (fre) were conceptualised by the physician, alchemist, botanist, philosopher and lay theologian Paracelsus (1493–1541) at the start of early modernity. These beings were said to dwell in the four elements, from which they were believed to sometimes appear before humans. During the 16th and 17th centuries, the reception of this concept ranged from natural-philosophical works to folkloric compendia and magical manuscripts. The historical analysis of the PhD project focusses on this period. Aside from this analysis, the project has a second goal. Debates in the history and philosophy of ecology have often involved the early modern period to further historicise and contextualise our contemporary relationship to a rapidly deteriorating environment. This offers insight into the emergence of many entangled socio-economic and cultural facets that are still with us today, such as the exploitation of the natural world on a global scale and the expanding infuence of capitalism. Given the relational and qualitative character of the concept of elemental beings as a “humanlike” representation of the natural world, this PhD project wishes to contribute to this discussion, and to ‘bring the early modern into the contemporary.’