Long before the Romantics embraced nature, people in the West saw the
human and nonhuman worlds as both intimately interdependent and
violently antagonistic. With its peerless selection of ninety-eight
original sources concerned with the natural world and humankind's place
within it, The Marvels of the World offers a corrective to the
still-prevalent tendency to dismiss premodern attitudes toward nature as
simple or univocal.
Gathering together medical texts, herbals, and how-to books, as well as
scientific, religious, philosophical, and poetic works dating from
antiquity to the dawn of the Enlightenment, the anthology explores both
mainstream and unconventional thinking about the natural world. Its
seven parts focus on philosophy and science; plants; animals; weather
and climate; ways of inhabiting the land; gardens and gardening; and
European encounters with the wider world. Each section and each of the
book's selections is prefaced with a helpful introduction by volume
editor Rebecca Bushnell that weaves connections among these compelling
pieces of the past. The early writers collected here wrote with
extraordinary openness about ways of coexisting with the nonhuman forces
that shaped them, Bushnell demonstrates, even as they sought to control
and exploit their environment. Taken as a whole, The Marvels of the
World reveals how many of these early writers cared as much about the
natural world as we do today.
