THE FARMER ASKED for a volunteer. I stepped forward. Sit down, cross-legged, in the middle of the field, and see what happens, she said. Cautiously and curiously I did as I was told. Within seconds, a whole herd of cows had clustered closely around me, noses down, to investigate the seated interloper. The farmer explained that cows are very inquisitive animals, always trying to make sense of their environs; and that since they do not sit in such a position, they are fascinated by people who do.

The 2016 volume Object Oriented Environs, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Julian Yates, charts the results of a session held at the forty-second annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America in St Louis in 2014. In the introduction (‘An environing of this book’), the editors recount their conference experience: walking around the city (‘peripatetic philosophizing’, they call it), breaking out of the stuffy conference room and heading through a door marked ‘Staff only, do not enter’, reflecting on the St Louis backdrop, from ancient mounds to the Gateway Arch. It is an exercise in porosity: in being open to academic material at the same time as to real-world, real-time materiality. Shakespeare and St Louis; theory and tourism. It is a shaking up: of the conference format, of what it means to introduce a book, of how to think in and about place.