Engaging with Nature: Essays on the Natural World in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (review)

In their introduction, Hanawalt and Kiser confess the difficulty of assembling an anthology on human attitudes to, impact on, and enmeshment in nature: the problem is that "nature is everywhere" (p. 1). And, indeed, if nature is everywhere, then humans should not be thought of as "engaging with nature," as this formulation implies that humans, being in and of nature, might step away from it. The anthology's first four chapters best recognize the impossibility of such disengagement, while its last three, whatever their strengths, remain within a paradigm in which nature is distinct from cultural activity, available to humans for their occasional study, exploitation, or fantasy.

The first essay, Richard C. Hoffmann's "Homo et Natura, Homo in Natura: Ecological Perspectives on the European Middle Ages," avers that "no medievalist can now . . . justify studying events in ignorance of the climatic and weather conditions in which they occurred" (p. 17), nor, for that matter, in ignorance of the ecological changes wrought by human food habits. His essay, less a contained argument than a guide toward new routes of research, begins by considering a few representative instances of specific regional medieval climate crises. While climate does not determine human behavior, it indisputably, as Hoffmann remarks, sets a "framework" (p. 17) in which certain actions can take place. Thus climate change compelled the Avar migration to the West in the sixth century and, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Norse abandonment of Greenland. Human activity in turn affects the climate and, of course, ecocultures: Hoffmann gestures toward the possibility that anthropogenic climate change may have led to the pandemics of 200-600 and 1300-1400, and, in more detail, he investigates the environmental impact of human agricultural activity. As woodland pasturage of pigs gave way in the late Middle Ages to open fields and grazing herbivores, soil erosion increased, resulting in the diminution of important animal resources and general agricultural fragility. With such results in mind, Hoffmann stresses that medievalists must make themselves aware of the "nonhuman dynamic" (p. 13) in human history.

The next two essays treat human interaction with nonhuman animals, with Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's "Inventing with Animals in the Middle Ages" first providing a set of general approaches to the imaginative relationships of humans to nonhuman animals. Cohen's systematic treatment of several methods for studying animals recalls his foundational "Monster Culture (Seven Theses)": I hope that this essay proves as influential. Cohen's discussion initially treads some familiar ground: the human use of animals as pets, food, and clothing, and, in fables and the bestiaries, as symbols. Cohen's key concern, however, is to treat animals as "proximate strangers" (p. 41) to humans, at once alien and familiar, through whose strangeness "foreclosed" potentials might be "opened to exploration" (p. 40). The hyena is the centerpiece of Cohen's method: Christian bestiarists utilized this anthropophagous, sexually ambiguous creature as an antisemitic symbol, but, in its refusal to be singularly gendered and in its alimentary perversity, the hyena might have modeled a way of life freed from clear binary divisions. Cohen similarly upends the straightforwardly racist animal polemic of twelfth-century Insular historians. In a treatment recalling his work in On Difficult Middles on Gerald of Wales's monsters, Cohen suggests that creatures like the acrobat donkey in William of Malmesbury's History of the English Kings hint at hybrid selves "which traditional vocabularies of identity were ill-equipped to express" (p. 52). These traditional vocabularies, committed as they are to discrete, sealed-off subjects, give way in Cohen's conclusion to a beautiful meditation on the wilderness wanderings in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in which the knight's self, dispersed through the landscape, "is multiple and interspecies" (p. 57) and hence never alone.

In the middle of his essay, Cohen remarks on the "ethical and theological repercussions" [End Page 124...