Nature in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Times

Human Body, Natural Causes, and Aging of the World in Czech-Language Sources of the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period

David Tomíček

Abstract

Understanding nature as an entity operating in the created world was one of the great intellectual innovations of the High Middle Ages. The authors who stopped interpreting nature as a cloak covered with symbols and allegories and began to rediscover nature as an internal factor of causes and effects, the knowledge of which is the task of the natural sciences until today, came mainly from cathedral schools. This study, which deals with Czech-language texts from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, is also based on the conceptualization of nature as an order of created things. The first ...