Early Modern Clouds II: Revisiting the Poetics of Meteorology

“Early Modern Clouds II” briefly introduces the four essays contained in this volume and refers readers to the more sustained, introductory essay of the first special issue of “Early Modern Clouds” in Romance Quarterly 68: 2, 2021. Here, the focus shifts from Hubert Damisch’s classic study of clouds in Théorie du nuage: Pour une histoire de la peinture (Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting; 1972; 2002) to the question of the cloud’s numerous mediating functions—including philosophy, poetics, art history—with an eye to later centuries, as explored by John Durham Peters in The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (2016).