The study of pre-modern anthropology requires the close examination of the relationship between nature and human society, which has been both precarious and threatening as well as productive, soothing, inviting, and pleasurable. Much depends on the specific circumstances, as the works by philosophers, theologians, poets, artists, and medical practitioners have regularly demonstrated. It would not be good enough, as previous scholarship has commonly done, to examine simply what the various writers or artists had to say about nature.

While modern scientists consider just the hard-core data of the objective world, cultural historians and literary scholars endeavor to comprehend the deeper meaning of the concept of nature presented by countless writers and artists. Only when we have a good grasp of the interactions between people and their natural environment, are we in a position to identify and interpret mental structures, social and economic relationships, medical and scientific concepts of human health, and the messages about all existence as depicted in major art works.

In light of the current conditions threatening to bring upon us a global crisis, it matters centrally to take into consideration pre-modern discourses on nature and its enormous powers to understand the topoi and tropes determining the concepts through which we perceive nature. Nature thus proves to be a force far beyond all human comprehensibility, being both material and spiritual depending on our critical approaches.

Contents

• Introduction – Albrecht Classen
• Nature and Human Society in the Pre-Modern World – Albrecht Classen
• Unnatural Humans: The Misbegotten Monsters of Beowulf – Fidel Fajardo-Acosta
• Natural Environment in the Old English Orosius: Ohthere’s Travel Accounts in Norway – Marialuisa Caparrini
• When Is a Good Time? Health Advice and the Months of the Year – Wendy Pfeffer
• Humans Serving Nature: Beekeeping and Bee Products in Piero de Crescenzi’s Ruralia commoda – Nicole Archambeau
• Medieval Epistemology and the Perception of Nature From the Physiologus to John of Garland and the Niederrheinische Orientbericht: Bestiaries and the ‘Book of Nature’ – Albrecht Classen
• Waste, Excess, and Profligacy as Critiques of Authority in Fourteenth-Century English Literature – Warren Tormey
• “A New Flood Was Released from the Heavens”: The Literary Responses to the Disaster of 1333 – Fabian Alfie
• The Environmental Causes of the Plague and their Terminology in the German Pestbücher of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries – Chiara Benati
• Island, Grove, Bark, and Pith: Nature Metaphors in Teresa de Cartagena – Connie L. Scarborough
• Nature, Art, and Human Perception in Giulio Romano’s Room of the Giants at the Palazzo del Te, Mantua (1532–1535) – Nurit Golan
• Human Body, Natural Causes, and Aging of the World in Czech-Language Sources of the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period – David Tomíček
• Perception of Air Quality in the Czech Lands of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries – Filip Hrbek
• Johann Arndt’s Book of Nature: Medieval Ideas During the German Reformation – Thomas Willard
• Imitation vs. Allegorization: Martin Opitz’s Influential Proposal Concerning Poetic Reflections on Nature – John Pizer
• François Bernier and Nature in Kashmir: Belonging in Paradise? – Pascale Barthe
• Cosmology and Pre-Modern Anthropology – Reinhold Münster
• Praising Perchta as the Embodiment of Nature’s Cycles: Worshipand Demonization of Perchta and Holda in Medieval and Early Modern Culture – William Mahan
• List of Illustrations
• Biographies of the Contributors
• Index

Source: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111387635/html