Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2017 -

This is the best overview in a decade of the shifting ideas of "nature" stated or implied by poetry and philosophy from the later Middle Ages into the Renaissance. Robertson (Univ. of Maryland, College Park) leaves many questions and materials to be explored further, but that is what important studies do. Robertson argues that notions and representations of "nature" first decoded nature as a guide to salvation and morality in 12th-century Neoplatonist literature and theology; then, with the 13th-century rediscovery of Aristotle, writers pondered the natural "forces" exerted on both human and nonhuman beings and on objects. Human inclinations show humans to be like iron and magnet, though they retain free will. This phase, displaying the "physics of love" elaborated in Jean de Meun, Chaucer, and other late-medieval writers, most lets nature speak. In the 15th and 16th centuries (John Lydgate and Edmund Spenser), "nature" became more mechanical, mathematical, "silenced." Allegory withered; poetry, now "moral," withdrew from "physics," a fateful division. Chaucer, Lydgate, and Spenser receive particularly fine treatments, but some theologians are treated with less dimension (Hugh of Saint-Victor is oddly assimilated into Bonaventure). The French poetry is well but summarily handled. Claims are wondrously lucid, alive with implications for ecocriticism and intellectual history broadly.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.