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

Even a quick look through the Middle English and the Anglo-Norman dictionaries reveals the complexity of the word nature in late medieval culture. Signifying a participant in creation, creation itself, and the human body and its inclinations are but a few of its semantic functions. The term was more a spectrum of connotations than a denotation. Kellie Robertson's new book, Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy, engages this protean subject through a close analysis of how an allegorized figure of Nature is conceived and presented in several later medieval texts, appearing variously as a figure representing Greek physis, as God's copartner in creation, as a subordinate mistress of creation, and as the impelling spirit of human will. Robertson places these different faces of Nature in the context of shifting attitudes toward Aristotelian thinking about the subjects of nature, knowledge, human will, and the created world between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. More especially she places the texts within a cultural context of scholastic debates between Augustinian transcendent Neoplatonism and contrasting Aristotelian theories of an immanent God. She maintains that the contentious theological and philosophical debates about what the term Nature signified provides a back story in later medieval texts that found an audience outside the circle of clergie.

As one might expect, such a broad and fundamental topic, so debated and so polymorphous, requires careful exposition and close attention to both text and reader. Robertson takes pains to present her discussion as clearly as possible, offering frequent summaries and explications to indicate the trajectory of her argument within each chapter and section. In the Introduction she lays out the premises of this dense work. Her overarching point is literary: that for a "significant group of writers popular in late medieval England . . . natural philosophy and the academic controversies it generated were not just a source of learned allusion but also the most obvious place to look when trying, as writers must, to transform the world into words" (p. 1). Nature becomes the allegorical figure through which to interrogate and assess answers to fundamental philosophical and theological questions centered in freedom of will. Are humans created to seek the good? Are they ruled by inclination or entirely free to choose?

These are questions and topics whose answers can occupy volumes, but Robertson limits the range of intellectual play invited by the concept Nature by dividing the book into three parts. The first of these, "Framing Medieval Nature," comprises two chapters. The first, "Figuring Physis," is devoted to how nature and natural philosophy were portrayed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when Aristotelian science began to challenge what she terms Augustinian, essentially Neoplatonic, explanations about causes. Is nature designed from a transcendent plan mirrored in creation, or is nature a series of immanent causes in which a Creator actively works to shape creation? The first chapter considers how tropes of creation used in conjunction with Nature—the ladder, the axe, the book—were adapted to both transcendent and immanent perspectives. Robertson links the tension of these various usages and interpretations to the anxieties that produced the Condemnations of Paris in 1277. The second chapter, "Aristotle's Nature and Its Discontents," returns to the Condemnations after initially discussing Aristotle's enduring popularity and the theological as well as epistemological messages of De pomo sive de morte Aristotilis. The Apple, or Aristotle's Death, a text on proper use of the senses, provides knowledge of the physical world and knowledge of its creator; it describes how the dying Aristotle experiences and explicates the significance of the fragrance of an apple. Robertson cites the wide circulation this frequently cited text enjoyed as an index to continuing interest in Aristotle's physis and epistemology, noting that for Trevisa, and for scholastic culture in Paris and beyond, "the image of Aristotle holding the apple to his nose emblematizes tensions over the proper use...