Modern historians of science often discuss the twelfth-century “discovery of nature” as a milestone in our relations with the environment. This article explores medieval scientific, literary, and theological writers who contributed to this distinctive set of attitudes even as it documents the significant continuities between these writings and those of classical and late antique authorities on the natural world. It traces how the encyclopedic imagination provided a hierarchical framework for understanding the world, and how this ontological scaffolding, in turn, underpinned the twelfth-century revival of Neoplatonic thought, as medieval Christian writers would enthusiastically adopt an earlier tradition of personifying nature. In the thirteenth century, this magisterial Natura came to reflect advances in the “new” Aristotelian science that would become the foundation of the medieval university curriculum. While the synthesis of Christian Neoplatonism and Aristotelian physis would remain the predominant model of nature for several centuries, it also occasioned polemical debates over how God related to the universe that he created and how knowledge of the natural world was to be valued and instrumentalized. This medieval vision of a human-scaled, personified nature would prove philosophically durable up to the Scientific Revolution.

In “The Book of Nature,” Rebecca Davis traces the development theological trope of the book of nature in the twelfth-century Neoplatonic allegories of Bernard Silvestris and Alan of Lille as well as in Augustinian theology. After exploring Natura’s role as God’s vicaria dei in the allegories of Alan and Bernard, Davis turns to the book of nature’s role in later medieval vernacular poems like Dante’s Divine Comedy and William Langland’s Piers Plowman. Davis argues that medieval authors utilize the book of nature to call attention to issues of interpretation at points when authors attempt to establish or contest literary authority. The book of nature calls on us to interpret the world just as we interpret texts. The chapter closes with later manifestations of the book of nature in the works of Milton, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Rachel Carson.