Description
Book SynopsisNature Speaks recovers the common ground shared between physics-what used to be known as "natural philosophy"-and fiction-writing as ways of representing the natural world. In doing so, it traces how nature gained an authoritative voice in the late medieval period only to lose it at the outset of modernity.
Trade Review"
Nature Speaks is inspirational, since it offers new insights for the field of medieval literature, and the ambition and scope of the work are to be applauded." *
Isis *
"At a moment when the human relationship to the natural world is deeply in need of attention and rearticulation, Kellie Robertson has given us a book that closely studies representations of the 'naturalness' of human beings in late medieval French and English literature. Robertson seeks to restore to view a pre-modern version of the human as internal to the natural world, a concept that creates a terrain for wideranging debate about the desires, compulsions, limits, and freedoms of human beings." *
Review of English Studies *
"Kellie Robertson's book is an indispensable study of the idea of nature in the writings of Jean de Meun, Guillaume de Deguileville, Geoffrey Chaucer, and John Lydgate. Revising the foundational work on nature and Platonism undertaken several generations ago, it offers an entirely new way of understanding the significance of nature in vernacular writing." * D. Vance Smith, Princeton University *
Table of ContentsA Note on Citations and Abbreviations
Introduction: Medieval Poetry and Natural Philosophy
PART I. FRAMING MEDIEVAL NATURE
Chapter 1. Figuring Physis
Chapter 2. Aristotle's Nature and Its Discontents
PART II. ALLEGORIZING NATURE IN THE VERNACULAR
Chapter 3. Jean de Meun and the Rule of Necessity
Chapter 4. Allegory Without Nature: Guillaume de Deguileville's Pèlerinage de vie humaine
PART III. LOVE AND TH ELIMITS OF NATURAL REASON
Chapter 5. Chaucer's Natures
Chapter 6. "Kyndely Reson" on Trial: Translating Nature After Chaucer
Epilogue: Nature's Silence: Humanism, Posthumanism, and the Legacy of Medieval Nature
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
