Search Results for natural world

... and the natural world. Hutchinson's theological prose engages with the writings of John Calvin and John Owen to frame scripture and nature as compatible but nonidentical revelations of divine glory. Likewise, Hutchinson's verse paraphrase of Genesis, Order and Disorder , suggests that both scripture and nature...

...Anne F. Harris The devotional complex of the chapel of Saint-Fiacre in Brittany offers an exceptional opportunity to consider the role of the natural world in the construction of the sacred in the late Middle Ages. Interactions between landscape, architecture, and ritual, this essay argues, created...

... experienced God, each other, and the world. Examining metaphor and imagery that adopts features of the natural world, this essay thinks through the implications for twelfth-century people's spiritual lives of the idea that God, through the Incarnation, entered not nature, but creation. In particular...

...Mary Trull Lucy Hutchinson's epic Genesis poem, Order and Disorder: Or, The World Made and Undone (1679), views humanity's place in the natural world through both John Calvin's providential theology and Lucretius's materialism in his ancient Roman epic, De rerum natura . Hutchinson reads...

... — 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...

...” of an unknown Northumbrian monastic community), as a window into the ways in which early medieval people saw their natural world not as a passive space for human activity, but as an active participant in religious life. This reading comports with ecocritical interpretations of Æthelwulf’s poem alongside...

...Matthew Milner Recent work in historical philosophy on the Aristotelian concept of qualities — that is, hot, cold, wet, and dry, the fundamental causal agents of the natural world — offers a moment to reconsider the connections between medicine, religion, and natural philosophy in late medieval...

...Caitlin Mahaffy This article investigates two literary works from the premodern era: Mandeville's Travels (composed between 1357 and 1371) and Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World (1666) , both of which depict hybrid creatures as natural rather than monstrously unnatural. These two texts...

... thought and deistic Newtonianism in natural philosophy. Rather than expressing these specific philosophical views, Masonic ritual effectuated philosophical reflection apart from the outside world. John Toland's proto-Masonic ritual document Pantheisticon shows how early modern rituals fostered thinking...

... and other sacred things.28 In a way, these lollard critiques anticipate the turn to object-­oriented ontology, which regards the material world in a fundamentally secular way — matter is just matter.29 While object-­oriented ontologies may be useful for thinking about the post-­Reformation natural...

... principle necessary to the definition of nature. Whether understood as a broad, vague, and elusive notion, or, on the contrary, as a strong ordering principle, nature supports life and the world. Sometimes it is described as the simple element of matter, sometimes as an entity rivaling God himself. Nature...

... “ecosociability,” the stance reached by wisdom traditions around the world that intuit the “entwinements of natural, human, and spirit realms, and that identify the good with what preserves, achieves, or renews material and social human wellbeing.” 10 David Aers recovers a similar ethics of “kindness” in his...

..., with an experimentalist hermeneutics that recognizes that knowledge of the material world requires the intellectual cognition of imperceptible operations. This hermeneutics, associated with later scientific inquiry, emerges from a broader scholastic project that approached transubstantiation with the tools of natural...

... in both the interior world of the human frame and in the macrocosm of the terrestrial world is shown to be very much the product of developing print culture. European navigators and natural philosophers, in their distinct spheres, were keen to preserve not just a record of the priority of discovery...

... that they have often been neglected or read around, but even those or, perhaps, especially those need connecting to the worlds and cultures that produced them. By their fragmentary and seemingly isolated natures, little things do not contain the thickness and depth of information that most historians...

... of mercantile imperialism that marked the discovery of the natural beauties of the New World. Yet, within the historical moment in which it played, the halcyon cure that this aging conquistador desired serves as a miniature parable that can reconfigure what is by all means a trivial colonialist narrative...

... to unveil the nature of that ecosystem and to explore the ways in which Creech's Familist underground fed into, and was in turn transformed by, the anarchic sectarian eruptions of the English Civil War and Revolution. The resulting analysis illuminates the ideological upheavals that turned the political...

... man-beast. Thomas wrote his romance at the very moment when both astrology and paradoxography (the writing of marvels) were being reevaluated as means of understanding the world, and so Alexander’s odd birth offers a reflection — shaped by the romance genre — on the limitations and ethical...

...Amanda Gerber This article explores the nature and significance of geographical diagrams in medieval commentaries on classical Roman poems. It situates these diagrams within larger conversations about cartographic traditions and the pedagogical contexts for which these diagrams were originally...

... experience of nature. In his landmark essay “The Structuralist Activity,” Roland Barthes revisits Hegel’s historical fable on the persistence of human fascination with “the Natural in Nature” and a readily perceptible (though as yet unnamed) presence in the natural world.2 Hegel identifies the Greek...