Engaging With Nature: Essays on the Natural World in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

by Barbara A. Hanawalt (Editor), Lisa J. Kiser (Editor)

Historians and cultural critics face special challenges when treating the nonhuman natural world in the medieval and early modern periods. Their most daunting problem is that in both the visual and written records of the time, nature seems to be both everywhere and nowhere. In the broadest sense, nature was everywhere, for it was vital to human survival. Agriculture, animal husbandry, medicine, and the patterns of human settlement all have their basis in natural settings. Humans also marked personal, community, and seasonal events by natural occurrences and built their cultural explanations around the workings of nature, which formed the unspoken backdrop for every historical event and document of the time. Yet in spite of the ubiquity of nature’s continual presence in the physical surroundings and the artistic and literary cultures of these periods, overt discussion of nature is often hard to find. Until the sixteenth century, responses to nature were quite often recorded only in the course of investigating other subjects. In a very real sense, nature went without saying. As a result, modern scholars analyzing the concept of nature in the history of medieval and early modern Europe must often work in deeply interdisciplinary ways. This challenge is deftly handled by the contributors to Engaging with Nature , whose essays provide insights into such topics as concepts of animal/human relationships; environmental and ecological history; medieval hunting; early modern collections of natural objects; the relationship of religion and nature; the rise of science; and the artistic representations of exotic plants and animals produced by Europeans encountering the New World.

Genres: Medieval

246 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2008

About the author

A specialist in medieval English social history, Barbara Hanawalt is Emeritus Professor of History at Ohio State University. . She received her PhD from University of Michigan in 1970, and taught at Indiana University and the University of Minnesota before moving to Ohio State University in 1999. She has served as President of the Medieval Academy of America and President of the Social Science History Association.

Reviews

[Karl Steel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Okay, since I read only 3 of the 4 medieval essays, and didn't touch the 3 early modern essays, I didn't actually finish this. The first, Richard Hoffman's argument for studying local climates, will please any fan of McCorkmick, Dutton, amd Mayewski's Volcano piece in Speculum 82 (2007): 865-95. It shouldn't be news that weather matters, but given lingering Cartesianism, and persistent anthropocentrism, it's news. However, since posthuman medievalism will get much from this kind of study, Hoffman's parting sneer at "postmodern" medievalists should have been stricken: they're really his allies. I'm pleased at his discussion of disruptions to local climates and geography by changes in human diet, but the "trophic pyramid" that illustrates some of his points leaves out something key, and, in so doing, keeps humans too firmly in their place in the hierarchy: for a hint on what's missing, see the black line running of the side of this example). The Susan Crane and JJ Cohen pieces I more or less knew already: I can recommend each highly, the Crane for its nuanced reading of aristocratic hunting and especially of deer poop (although given bourgeois participation in hunting according to various civic privileges, she should have called it elite hunting), and the Cohen for his expansion of his work on race and animality from On Difficult Middles and, especially, for his an-anthropocentric reading of SGGK, which is here, I presume, seeing print for the first time.

UPDATE
I've been assigned this book to review for JEGP, so I've finally read the whole thing. And I just downgraded it from 4 to 3 stars. Briefly, the medieval chapters are the best. Baring some complaints [see above:], great work Hoffman, Cohen, Crane, and Kaye [and the Kaye is really in the best mode of intellectual history:]. The Early Modern chapters range from the disappointing [Swann:], to the pointless [Smith:], to the appalling [Berger Hochstrasser:]. The slightest familiarity with, say, Horkheimer and Adorno, or this book, or ecocriticism could have saved these chapters; as it stands, their only real use is in providing raw material for future critical work. Overall, my MAJOR complaint is that--excepting Cohen--no essay ever thinks through the human relation to nature as an internal relation. It's as if nature is just 'out there.' In other words, this anthology desperately needed an essay on, say, medieval or early modern comparative anatomy, or medicinal anthropophagy, or the influence of the stars on the self, or anything that would recall to us that humans are part of nature too.

More to come when I write the actual review.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is another collection of essays on eco criticism that does what the title says. I'm seeing a pattern here. I only read one essay out of this collection that is pertinent to my research paper, "Inventing with Animals in the Middle Ages" by Jeffery J Cohen- a man that I quickly developing an academic crush on as he keeps coming in my research for my thesis. This animal essay is excellent. Cohen very nicely connects the dots between Medieval bestiaries, other literature, and history. I was up until I read this ignorant of the sexuality contained within bestiaries. This essay also ties in nicely with the monster theme I am using to teach my 102 class as I can in the pages of this essay the precursor, or maybe the companion, to the werewolf.