Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy by Kellie Robertson (review)

A. O. Lovejoy once wrote that the task of the historian of ideas is to "trace connectedly" the "working of a given conception, of an explicit or tacit presupposition, of a type of mental habit, or of a specific thesis or argument" across a range of discourses and historical periods—all in the attempt to "put gates through the fences" that separate these discourses and periods from each other.⁷ In Nature Speaks, Kellie Robertson has given medievalists an ambitious and often dazzling work of premodern intellectual history cast in precisely this mold. Over the course of eight chapters, Robertson broadly outlines different models of nature in both contemporary theory and medieval literature and philosophy by tracking the fortunes of a single idea. This is the Aristotelian concept of inclinatio, or "inclination," which sought to explain how and why each natural creature was inclined, both temporally and physically, toward a certain end. As Robertson observes, inclinatio was a hot topic in both philosophy and poetry during the Middle Ages, because its power to explain certain human behaviors (such as sexual desire) often ran at cross purposes to certain orthodoxies in medieval Christianity (such as the freedom of the human will). By telling the story of inclinatio from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, Robertson casts valuable light on the way that medieval culture thought about humanity's place in nature. In the process, she also makes a persuasive case for why scholars of medieval literature ought to pay better attention to natural philosophy, which both poets and philosophers inevitably drew upon whenever they sought, as she puts it, "to transform the world into words" (1).

Nature Speaks begins with three chapters that lay out its theoretical stakes and introduce two broad claims that recur through the book. The first claim is that there were two primary models for nature during the Middle Ages: "a 'transcendent' one, associated with Neoplatonic and Augustinian writers who saw nature as inscrutable and to varying degrees detached from the human world, and an 'immanent' one, associated with Aristotelian and Thomist writers who believed that the regular teleological processes observable in nature could not only reveal aspects of the divine plan but also teach us something about ourselves" (3). The second is that this dichotomy makes itself particularly felt in debates over the influence of inclinatio upon the will during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—something that Robertson demonstrates with a deft reading of the role that "kyndely enclyning" plays in Chaucer's House of Fame. Chapters 1 ("Figuring Physis") and 2 ("Aristotle's Nature") prosecute both of these claims in greater depth, by considering how nature was conceptualized, figured, and debated by both Augustinians and Aristotelians during the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries. Chapter 1 focuses mostly on four common figurations of Nature and her activity (ladder, book, artisan, or ax) in a wide range of texts including Gautier de Metz's L'image du monde, the Prick of Conscience, and Bartholomeus Anglicus's De proprietatibus rerum. Chapter 2 assesses the significance of a key event: Bishop Etienne Tempier's 1277 condemnation, at the University of Paris, of more than 219 propositions that pertained to Aristotelian natural philosophy. Robertson argues that, while the 1277 condemnation was broadly concerned with epistemology in general and "the limits of natural reason" (93), it also interrogated the particular legacy of Aristotle himself—a legacy that was often debated, as she observes, in accounts of whether or not the philosopher died a Christian death. By reading various accounts of Aristotle's end, such as the spurious De pomo, or select passages in Ranulph Higden's Polychronicon, Robertson makes it clear that the epistemological value of Aristotle's thought was hardly a settled matter during the fourteenth century.

With this theoretical groundwork laid, Robertson next turns her attention to literary representations of Nature in the work of four late...