Download or read book The Medieval Discovery of Nature written by Steven Epstein and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-28 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Medieval Discovery of Nature written by Professor Steven A Epstein and published by . This book was released on 2014-05-14 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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."
Download or read book The Medieval World of Nature written by Joyce E. Salisbury and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-26 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book An Environmental History of the Middle Ages written by John Aberth and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book Science and the Secrets of Nature written by William Eamon and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Medieval Natural World written by Richard Jones and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-14 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History 1200 1550 written by Jean A. Givens and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Negotiating the Landscape written by Ellen F. Arnold and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-12-18 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century written by Joel Kaye and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-10-05 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides perspectives on the ways in which scholastic natural philosophy anticipated and contributed to the emergence of scientific thought.
Download or read book Physiologus written by and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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""
Download or read book The Nature of Natural Philosophy in the Late Middle Ages Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy Volume 52 written by Edward Grant and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2010-04-05 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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."
Download or read book Science Art and Nature in Medieval and Modern Thought written by A. C. Crombie and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 1990-07-01 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author sees the history of Western Science as the history of a vision and an argument, initiated by the ancient Greeks in their search for principles at once of nature and of argument itself. This scientific vision explored and controlled by argument, and the diversification of both vision and argument by scientific experience and by interaction with the wider contexts of intellectual culture, constitute the long history of European scientific thought. Underlying that development have been specific commitments to conceptions of nature and of science and its intellectual and moral assumptions, accompanied by a recurrent critique; their diversification has generated a series of different styles of scientific thinking and of making theoretical and practical decisions which the work describes.
Download or read book Nature Sex and Goodness in a Medieval Literary Tradition written by Hugh White and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2000 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Nature' is a highly important term in the ethical discourse of the Middle Ages and, as such, a leading concept in medieval literature. This book examines the moral status of the natural in writings by Alan of Lille, Jean de Meun, John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, and others, showinghow-particularly in the erotic sphere-the influences of nature are not always conceived as wholly benign. Though medieval thinkers often affirm an association of nature with reason, and therefore with the good, there is also an acknowledgement that the animal, the pre-rational, the instinctivewithin human beings may be validly considered natural. In fact, human beings may be thought to be urged almost ineluctably by the force of nature within them towards behaviour hostile to reason and the right.
Download or read book Approaches to Nature in the Middle Ages written by State University of New York at Binghamton. Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies. Conference and published by Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS). This book was released on 1982 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Medieval Robots written by E. R. Truitt and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2015-06-11 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medieval robots took such forms as talking statues, mechanical animals, or silent metal guardians; some served to entertain or instruct while others performed surveillance or discipline. Medieval Robots explores the forgotten history of real and imagined machines that captivated Europe from the ninth through the fourteenth centuries.
Download or read book Thinking about the Environment written by T. M. Robinson and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2002 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why should the work of the ancient and the medievals, so far as it relates to nature, still be of interest and an inspiration to us now? The contributions to this enlightening volume explore and uncover contemporary scholarship's debt to the classical and medieval past. Thinking About the Environment synthesizes religious thought and environmental theory to trace a trajectory from Mesopotamian mythology and classical and Hellenistic Greek, through classical Latin writers, to medieval Christian views of the natural world and our relationship with it. The work also offers medieval Arabic and Jewish views on humanity's inseparability from nature. The volume concludes with a study of the breakdown between science and value in contemporary ecological thought. Thinking About the Environment will be a invaluable source book for those seeking to address environmental ethics from a historical perspective.
Download or read book Medieval Bodies written by Jack Hartnell and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2018-03-29 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A SUNDAY TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR 'A triumph' Guardian 'Glorious ... makes the past at once familiar, exotic and thrilling.' Dominic Sandbrook 'A brilliant book' Mail on Sunday Just like us, medieval men and women worried about growing old, got blisters and indigestion, fell in love and had children. And yet their lives were full of miraculous and richly metaphorical experiences radically different to our own, unfolding in a world where deadly wounds might be healed overnight by divine intervention, or the heart of a king, plucked from his corpse, could be held aloft as a powerful symbol of political rule. In this richly-illustrated and unusual history, Jack Hartnell uncovers the fascinating ways in which people thought about, explored and experienced their physical selves in the Middle Ages, from Constantinople to Cairo and Canterbury. Unfolding like a medieval pageant, and filled with saints, soldiers, caliphs, queens, monks and monstrous beasts, it throws light on the medieval body from head to toe - revealing the surprisingly sophisticated medical knowledge of the time in the process. Bringing together medicine, art, music, politics, philosophy and social history, there is no better guide to what life was really like for the men and women who lived and died in the Middle Ages. Medieval Bodies is published in association with Wellcome Collection.
