-
Introduction
- University of Notre Dame Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Introduction Barbara A. Hanawalt and Lisa J. Kiser The seven essays in this collection address the subject of the natural world in a number of medieval and early modern contexts, each giving special attention to human interactions with the natural environments that surrounded and supported both life and culture. These essays, representing several disciplines, and sometimes combining traditional disciplines, are designed to make readers aware of current scholarship investigating nature in the premodern and early modern past. Special problems beset historians and cultural critics treating the nonhuman natural world in these periods. The most daunting problem is that in both the visual and written records of the time, nature appears to be both everywhere and nowhere. In the broadest sense, of course, nature is everywhere. It supplies the most important contexts for human survival, since agriculture, animal husbandry, medicine, and the patterns of human settlement and migration all have their basis in natural settings. Moreover, humans marked personal, community, daily, 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. Nature was everywhere, too, in the texts and artifacts in which medieval and early modern people recorded and represented their 1 social and religious identities. The surviving records relating to heraldry , hunting, cooking, theology, folklore, sports, science, and art (to mention only a few of the cultural arenas in which nature features prominently) vividly reflect medieval and early modern responses to the natural world. Despite the ubiquity of nature’s presence in the artistic and literary cultures of these periods, however, it is also true that overt discussion of it is seldom found. Until the sixteenth century, when scientific writing began to take as its primary subject the close observation of nature, responses to nature were often recorded only in the course of an investigation of some other subject, such as how one might interpret a certain biblical passage, or concoct an effective treatment for fever, or ensnare a rabbit, or (to take an Aesopic example) satirize irresponsible clergy. In other words, medieval and early modern writers, unlike their modern counterparts, seldom sat down to write essays or treatises on nature in and of itself. Indeed, for many writing in these early periods, “nature” was arguably not even a discursive category; it simply went without saying. Consequently, modern scholars seeking to analyze the understanding of nature in the medieval and early modern periods often find it necessary to become experts in fields seemingly unrelated to their central concern. They may need to become familiar with theology; social history; literary and other artistic forms; agricultural, medicinal, and culinary traditions; or any number of practices that necessarily involve nature or attitudes about nature: war, sports, hunting, divination, petkeeping , law, and private devotion, to name a few. Thus, medieval or early modern natural and environmental history, perhaps more than most modern academic specializations, is profoundly interdisciplinary , requiring attention not only to the aspect of nature under analysis , but also to the social, philosophical, and scientific context in which it is found. This observation finds ample illustration in the essays in this volume. Each skillfully weaves together knowledge from disparate fields to gain insight into an aspect of nature as it was understood or experienced in medieval and early modern Europe. The special topics covered here include animal/human relationships, environmental and ecological history, medieval hunting, early modern collections of natural objects, the moral relationship of religion and nature, the rise of science, and the motives underlying the artistic representations of plants, animals, and humans made by Europeans encountering the New 2 Barbara A. Hanawalt and Lisa J. Kiser [3.236.111.234] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 02:31 GMT) World for the first time. Although wide-ranging in their approaches, the essays in this volume also contribute to traditional disciplines, such as the history of art, the history of science, environmental history, literary history, political history, and the history of ideas. The study of nature in the medieval and early modern periods is an emerging discipline in its own right, but the essayists also add to bodies of knowledge defined by the distinctive standards, methodologies, and paradigms of established fields. To situate the essays in current research, it is useful to mention briefly two matters critical to understanding the issues at stake. The first is the problematic ontological status of the category of “nature” itself; the second...