Renaissance non-humanism: plants, animals, machines, matter

This review article considers the turn to non-humans – plants, animals, machines, and inanimate matter – within Renaissance studies. Taking four recent monographs as its central examples, the article argues that critical interest in the non-human should not be understand as indicative of an emerging post-humanistic era, but rather as part of a new humanism, one which finally acknowledges Man's inescapable enmeshment within a larger ecology of organic and non-organic agents.