Abstract: This essay explores the relationship among air, wind, and language – “aeolian poetics” – in early modern texts, including Le Livre sur le néant by Charles de Bovelles (1510), Le Théâtre de Neptune by Marc Lescarbot (1606), and The Blazing-World by Margaret Cavendish (1666); art works such as the Philosophy woodcut (1502) and the Melencolia I engraving (1514) by Albrecht Dürer; and in cartography, ethnically marked and ageing wind-heads on Ptolemaic maps from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
