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

Chapter 1: Homo et Natura, Homo in Natura: Ecological Perspectives on the European Middle Ages

chapter one Homo et Natura, Homo in Natura Ecological Perspectives on the European Middle Ages Richard C. Hoffmann On the relationship between nature and humankind, most literate medieval Europeans shared certain basic ideological assumptions . Homo, “Mankind,” was separate and distinct from Natura, “Nature .” Homo in fact had been created to rule over Nature, the earth, Creation . Both Natura and Homo exist temporally in the world of change, the sublunar sphere in a Ptolemaic construction of an Aristotelian universe . Yet from that consensus different medieval thinkers drew implications as divergent as today’s stereotypical Homo ecologicus, conserving steward, and Homo devastans, planetary bane. The twelfth-century French clerical Neoplatonist Bernard Silvester elaborated in his Cosmographia a mythico-scientific allegory of creation and the interrelationship of man (microcosm) and the universe (macrocosm ).1 In the part of his work Bernard devoted to humankind,2 Homo appears as the microcosm, the image of the greater world, who is given knowledge of the ways of things of the world and made “ruler and high priest of Creation, that he may subordinate all to himself, rule on earth and govern the universe.”3 Working with Nature’s tabula fati, which manage the destiny of all “temporal things subject to change,”4 11 Homo improves the pliant earth provided for him by Natura. As the allegorical creatrix Noys put it, It is my will that the elements be his, that fire grow hot for him, the sun shine, the earth be fruitful, the sea ebb and flow; that the earth give nourishment to its fruits, the sea to its fish, the mountains to their flocks, and the wilderness to its beasts for him.5 Autonomous Nature and humankind thus collaborate to complete and perfect Creation.6 A contrasting view was voiced in the early 1490s by Paul Schneevogel (1460/65 to after 1514), a humanist schoolteacher and later municipal official in Upper Saxony who wrote as “Paulus Niavis.” His Iudicium Iovis, “The Judgement of Jupiter,” offered as a parable the vision of a Bohemian hermit in the central European Erzgebirge (“Ore Mountains”).7 The recluse sees the Earth and the classical divinities of Nature together hailing Homo before the court of Jupiter, chief of the gods. By mining and woodcutting, Homo had injured complaining Earth, who reluctantly yields up her wealth to his coercion. Bacchus , Ceres, the naiads, Minerva, Pluto, Charon, and the fauns report loss and pollution of waters, damage to wine and cereal harvests, destruction of woodlands, noise, and noxious fumes. In his defence, Homo replies that Earth was a false mother, withholding love and concealing from him what the gods had provided for the use of humankind .8 Man’s advocates, the dwarves (penates, wichtellein in contemporary German-Latin glossaries), assert that Homo had to take the entire known world under his protection (tutela), which could be done only through work (labor) above and below ground. Faced with two strong cases, Jupiter defers judgement to Fortuna, Queen of all things mortal, who declares: Men are destined to stab through the mountains, to construct mine shafts, to till fields, to conduct trade, and to strike against the earth, to reject learning; to disturb Pluto; and even to seek out veins of metal in water courses; [man’s] body [is destined] to be swallowed up by the earth, to be choked by fumes, intoxicated by wine; to be subjected to hunger and many additional 12 Richard C. Hoffmann dangers that it would be best not to know, which are peculiar to humankind.9 Humans and Nature thus engage in a costly contest of mutual attrition.10 Whether Homo and Natura were in collaboration or conflict, however, both Bernard Silvester and Paul Schneevogel recognized them as together driving change, that is, they acknowledged both as part of history, specifically their own history now called “medieval.” Their acceptance of natural and human changes is interestingly mirrored by refinements in present-day ecology, the science which studies interactions among organisms and inanimate nature, their mutual agencies, and ways humans can perceive and understand those phenomena. Recent developments of “the new ecology,” “historical ecology,” and “social ecology” have enlarged this approach by recognizing change and the role human cultures can play in it.11 Natural scientists no longer think of “Nature” as a mere fixed stage set, or even as necessarily tending toward some kind of equilibrium, but rather as encompassing the...