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The Medieval Discovery of Nature

Author: Steven Epstein

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-09-28

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 1107026458

This book examines the relationship between humans and nature that evolved in medieval Europe over the course of a millennium. From the beginning, people lived in nature and discovered things about it. Ancient societies bequeathed to the Middle Ages both the Bible and a pagan conception of natural history. These conflicting legacies shaped medieval European ideas about the natural order and what economic, moral, and biological lessons it might teach. This book analyzes five themes found in medieval views of nature - grafting, breeding mules, original sin, property rights, and disaster - to understand what some medieval people found in nature and what their assumptions and beliefs kept them from seeing.

The Medieval Discovery of Nature

Author: Professor Steven A Epstein

Publisher:

Published: 2014-05-14

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9781139550017

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This book examines the relationship between humans and nature that evolved in medieval Europe over the course of a millennium. From the beginning, people lived in nature and discovered things about it. Ancient societies bequeathed to the Middle Ages both the Bible and a pagan conception of natural history. These conflicting legacies shaped medieval European ideas about the natural order and what economic, moral, and biological lessons it might teach. This book analyzes five themes found in medieval views of nature grafting, breeding mules, original sin, property rights, and disaster to understand what some medieval people found in nature and what their assumptions and beliefs kept them from seeing."

The Medieval World of Nature

Author: Joyce E. Salisbury

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-06-26

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 0429584237

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Originally published in 1993, The Medieval World of Nature looks at how the natural world was viewed by medieval society. The book presents the argument that the pragmatic medieval view of the natural world of animals and plants, existed simply to serve medieval society. It discusses the medieval concept of animals as food, labour, and sport and addresses how the biblical charge of assuming dominion over animals and plants, was rooted in the medieval sensibility of control. The book also looks at the idea of plants and animals as not only pragmatic, but as allegories within the medieval world, utilizing animals to draw morality tales, which were viewed with as much importance as scientific information. This book provides a unique and interesting look at the everyday medieval world.

An Environmental History of the Middle Ages

Author: John Aberth

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 0415779456

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The Middle Ages was a critical and formative time for Western approaches to our natural surroundings. An Environmental History of the Middle Ages is a unique and unprecedented cultural survey of attitudes towards the environment during this period. Exploring the entire medieval period from 500 to 1500, and ranging across the whole of Europe, from England and Spain to the Baltic and Eastern Europe, John Aberth focuses his study on three key areas: the natural elements of air, water, and earth; the forest; and wild and domestic animals. Through this multi-faceted lens, An Environmental History of the Middle Ages sheds fascinating new light on the medieval environmental mindset. It will be essential reading for students, scholars and all those interested in the Middle Ages

Science and the Secrets of Nature

Author: William Eamon

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-06-30

Total Pages: 508

ISBN-13: 0691214611

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By explaining how to sire multicolored horses, produce nuts without shells, and create an egg the size of a human head, Giambattista Della Porta's Natural Magic (1559) conveys a fascination with tricks and illusions that makes it a work difficult for historians of science to take seriously. Yet, according to William Eamon, it is in the "how-to" books written by medieval alchemists, magicians, and artisans that modern science has its roots. These compilations of recipes on everything from parlor tricks through medical remedies to wool-dyeing fascinated medieval intellectuals because they promised access to esoteric "secrets of nature." In closely examining this rich but little-known source of literature, Eamon reveals that printing technology and popular culture had as great, if not stronger, an impact on early modern science as did the traditional academic disciplines.

The Medieval Natural World

Author: Richard Jones

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-11-14

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 1317861507

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How did medieval people make sense of their surroundings, and how did this change over the years as understanding and knowledge expanded? This new Seminar Study is designed to familiarise students of medieval history with the ways in which medieval people interpreted the world around them – how they rationalised their observations, and why they developed the models for understanding that they did. Most importantly, it shows how ideas changed over the medieval period, and why. With extensive primary source material, this book builds up a picture using medieval encyclopedias, prose literature and poetry, records of estate management, agricultural treatises, scientific works, annals and chronicles, as well as the evidence from art, architecture, archaeology and the landscape itself. An excellent introduction for undergraduate students of Medieval history, or for anyone with an interest in the medieval natural world.

Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History, 1200–1550

Author: Jean A. Givens

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 1351875566

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Images in medieval and early modern treatises on medicine, pharmacy, and natural history often confound our expectations about the functions of medical and scientific illustrations. They do not look very much like the things they purport to portray; and their actual usefulness in everyday medical practice or teaching is not obvious. By looking at works as diverse as herbals, jewellery, surgery manuals, lay health guides, cinquecento paintings, manuscripts of Pliny's Natural History, and Leonardo's notebooks, Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History, 1200-1550 addresses fundamental questions about the interplay of art and science from the thirteenth to the mid-sixteenth century: What counts as a medical illustration in the Middle Ages? What are the purposes and audiences of the illustrations in medieval medical, pharmaceutical, and natural history texts? How are images used to clarify, expand, authenticate, and replace these texts? How do images of natural objects, observed phenomena, and theoretical concepts amplify texts and convey complex cultural attitudes? What features lead us to regard some of these images as typically 'medieval' while other exactly contemporary images strike us as 'Renaissance' or 'early modern' in character? Art historians, medical historians, historians of science, and specialists in manuscripts and early printed books will welcome this wide-ranging, interdisciplinary examination of the role of visualization in early scientific inquiry.

Physiologus

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 1979

Total Pages: 142

ISBN-13:

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One of the most popular and widely read books of the Middle Ages, "Physiologus "contains allegories of beasts, stones, and trees both real and imaginary, infused by their anonymous author with the spirit of Christian moral and mystical teaching.a Accompanied by an introduction that explains the origins, history, and literary value of this curious text, this volume also reproduces twenty woodcuts from the 1587 version. Originally composed in the fourth century in Greek, and translated into dozens of versions through the centuries, "Physiologus "will delight readers with its ancient tales of ant-lions, centaurs, and hedgehogsOCoand their allegorical significance. OC An elegant little book . . . still diverting to look at today. . . . The woodcuts reproduced from the 1587 Rome edition are alone worth the price of the book.OCOOCoRaymond A. Sokolov, "New York Times Book Review""

The Nature of Natural Philosophy in the Late Middle Ages (Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy, Volume 52)

Author: Edward Grant

Publisher: CUA Press

Published: 2010-04-05

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 0813217385

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In this volume, distinguished scholar Edward Grant identifies the vital elements that contributed to the creation of a widespread interest in natural philosophy, which has been characterized as the "Great Mother of the Sciences."

Negotiating the Landscape

Author: Ellen F. Arnold

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2012-12-18

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0812207521

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Negotiating the Landscape explores the question of how medieval religious identities were shaped and modified by interaction with the natural environment. Focusing on the Benedictine monastic community of Stavelot-Malmedy in the Ardennes, Ellen F. Arnold draws upon a rich archive of charters, property and tax records, correspondence, miracle collections, and saints' lives from the seventh to the mid-twelfth century to explore the contexts in which the monks' intense engagement with the natural world was generated and refined. Arnold argues for a broad cultural approach to medieval environmental history and a consideration of a medieval environmental imagination through which people perceived the nonhuman world and their own relation to it. Concerned to reassert medieval Christianity's vitality and variety, Arnold also seeks to oppose the historically influential view that the natural world was regarded in the premodern period as provided by God solely for human use and exploitation. The book argues that, rather than possessing a single unifying vision of nature, the monks drew on their ideas and experience to create and then manipulate a complex understanding of their environment. Viewing nature as both wild and domestic, they simultaneously acted out several roles, as stewards of the land and as economic agents exploiting natural resources. They saw the natural world of the Ardennes as a type of wilderness, a pastoral haven, and a source of human salvation, and actively incorporated these differing views of nature into their own attempts to build their community, understand and establish their religious identity, and relate to others who shared their landscape.