I admit to feeling a little embarrassed—though flattered, of course—at finding myself face to face with a rhetorical flourish I came up with to conclude a Sunday morning MLA panel. ‘What can early modern French literature do for ecocriticism?’ It is easy to ask sweeping questions like this one—verba volant, after all. It is much harder to respond as this volume’s editors did initially, and their contributors subsequently, with serious scholarly engagement, including troubling (in a very welcome way) some of the assumptions of the question itself. The result is this innovative and diverse collection that does the work my question merely gestured at before retreating. The authors have all done the hard work; it is a pleasure to write this epilogue and I hope I can do some justice to their insights.

Renaissance French humanism is of course a distant relative of our own intellectual field, the humanities ‘with an accent’ as Phillip and Pauline put it. And this book shows, I think, that humanist thinking then and now is always already é/ecological. As I tried to pull together the many connections made here between past and present, I realized that the authors were also making connections between humanistic and ecological thinking as modes of relating and being in the world. Wondering where to start with this notion, I found myself thinking, perhaps predictably, of Joachim Du Bellay. Here are the quatrains of the sonnet, number 38 from Les Regrets, which sprung to mind: