Nature in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Times

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

Abstract

Postmodern readers tend to misunderstand most of medieval attempts to come to terms with nature, which was consistently viewed through allegorical lenses. Of course, in the daily context during the Middle Ages, nature was nature, and farmers and hunters, for instance, engaged with animals as they needed. Gardens and fields were set up and maintained, fishermen were regularly occupied, and woodcutters and foresters were busily at work in the forests. The philosophical and literary approach to nature, however, operated quite differently because animals ...