Reading the Natural World in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Perceptions of the Environment and Ecology

Hardback, xxi + 232 pages, Size:156 x 234 mm, Illustrations:7 b/w, 9 col., Language: English. ISBN 9782503590448. Summary The environment - together with ecology and other aspects of the way people see their world - has become a major focus of pre-modern studies. The thirteen contributions in this volume discuss topics across the millennium in Europe from the late 600s to the early 1600s. They introduce applications to older texts, art works, and ideas made possible by relatively new fields of discourse such as animal studies, ecotheology, and Material Engagement Theory. From studies of medieval land charters and epics to the canticles sung in churches, the encyclopedic natural histories compiled for the learned, the hunting parks described and illustrated for the aristocracy, chronicles from the New World, classical paintings from the Old World, and the plays of Shakespeare, the authors engage with the human responses to nature in times when it touched their lives more intimately than it does for people today, even though this contact raised concerns that are still very much alive today. TABLE OF CONTENTS Abbreviations Introduction: Reading the Book of Nature - THOMAS WILLARD, University of Arizona Part I: Perspectives Reading Early Medieval Landscape and Environment: Materially Engaged Approaches to Documentary Sources - MICHAEL BINTLEY, Birkbeck College, University of London Rivers as Critical Boundaries in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival and Titurel: Ecocritical Perspectives in Medieval German Literature - ALBRECHT CLASSEN, University of Arizona Part II: The Medieval World Feathers and Figuration: Ravens in Old English Literature -TODD PRESTON, Lycoming College Nature as Worshiper: Reading "The Song of the Three Children" in Daniel and Azarias - EMMA KNOWLES, University of Sydney The Exemplary Environment of Bartholomeus Anglicus - MICHAEL W. TWOMEY, Ithaca College Field Notes on the Inferno: Snakes (and Cords) - LORI J. ULTSCH, Hofstra University Corruption and Redemption: An Ecotheological Reading of Ála Flekks saga -TIFFANY NICOLE WHITE, University of California at Berkeley Visualizing the Medieval Park: Real Spaces and Imagined Places in Le livre de chasse - REBEKAH L. PRATT-STURGES, Northern Arizona University Part III: The Early Modern World Nature as Book and Stage in Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo's Chronicles of Nicaragua -SARAH H. BECKJORD, Boston College Saul and Paul in the Wilderness: Two Religious Landscapes of Pieter Bruegel the Elder - CATHERINE SCHULTZ MCFARLAND, Independent Scholar "I on my horse, and love on me": Contextualizing the Equestrian Metaphors of Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella - JENNIFER BESS, Goucher College Shakespeare's Savage Trees - GRACE TIFFANY, Western Michigan University How to do Things with Birds: The Radical Politics of Nature's Speech Acts in Macbeth - SETH SWANNER, Northwestern University Notes on Contributors 0 g.…