Scaling Nature: Microcosm and Macrocosm in Later Medieval Thought

Late medieval writers were enamored with metaphors of scale for imagining mankind in relation to the rest of the created world. This article takes the minor mundus — the idea of the human as a “lesser world” patterned after the greater, cosmic one — as a point of departure for exploring medieval debates about what it meant to be an embodied human that stood simultaneously apart from and yet within the natural world. It argues that microcosmic thinking was particularly prominent in the tradition of the Roman de la Rose, because it allowed writers to enter into a long-standing conversation about how the physical environment potentially influenced the human will. A scalar logic of nature was embraced by some of these popular writers and rebuffed by others, depending on their view of how the soul was situated with respect to the material body. Revisiting these ubiquitous microcosmic figures gives us insight into sometimes opaque medieval intellectual practice even as it demonstrates how the history of rhetoric can contribute to a broader history of materialism.