Overview

A collection of essays that explore how humans understood their relationship with the environment in the Middle Ages. Using written and visual evidence from c.1150–1500 CE—including medical, literary, and scientific works—the essays in this collection address the relationship between the human and the “natural” at a time when new worlds, new texts, and new religious experiences reshaped the individual and collective relationship with the cosmos.

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9781837720576

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"""In the wake of numerous new studies engaged with the concept of nature, which is now also studied through a medieval lens, this volume offers a range of fascinating papers that examine how individual medieval writers or artists viewed themselves within their material environment. While we find ourselves today in the Anthropocene, already in the pre-modern world, many voices can be heard that promoted a closely-knit entanglement of the material with the spiritual dimension. It would go too far to talk about harmony, but the typically medieval mindset, such as among mystics, certainly promoted an allegorical concept of nature we today might profit from under the current dangerous circumstances. A gender perspective, as pursued in a number of papers, strongly suggests medieval women's unique approaches to their natural and social environment, especially when they situated themselves within a garden or conceived of the world as an oyster - or when they had to struggle against men's tendency to relegate women into a gendered space to guarantee male authority, also with regard to nature. The study of 'nature' here leads to new insights into women's individuality and even independence, or female identity."" -- ""Dr Albrecht Classen, University of Arizona"""

Author Information

Theresa Tyers is a research fellow at the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Research at Swansea University. Patricia Skinner is a former professor of history at Swansea University.

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