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Search - Man and the Natural World-Changing Attitudes in England, 1500-1800

Man and the Natural WorldChanging Attitudes in England 15001800
Author: Keith Thomas

In the early twentieth century a devotion to rural pursuits was characteristic of the English upper classes. This feeling for the countryside, real or imagined, was not confined to this class alone, but was common to many members of the first industrial nation. However, only a few hundred years earlier the idea that human cultivation was somethi... more »ng to be resisted rather than encouraged would have been unthinkable. For how had civilization progressed, if not by the clearance of the forests, the cultivation of the soil and the conversion of wild landscape into human settlement? This passion to preserve wild scenery and the faith in the healing powers of unexploited nature would have been inconceivable without the profound shift in sensibilities which occurred in England between the sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries. Man and the Natural World aims not just to explain present interest in preserving the environment, but to reconstruct an earlier mental world in its own right. Keith Thomas seeks to expose the assumptions beneath the perceptions, reasonings, and feelings of the inhabitants of early modern England toward the animals, birds, vegetation and physical landscape among which they spent their lives, often in conditions of proximity which are now difficult for us to appreciate. Although this study is confined to England, many of its themes can be closely paralleled in the history of Europe and North America. It also makes detailed reference to literary sources of a kind not currently used by historians. (For example, passages from The Bible, the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Ovid's Metamorphoses.) Here then is a reunion of the studies of history and literature in a tradition seldom used today. Throughout, Thomas illustrates that this subject-matter deserves more serious historical treatment than it has yet received. Man's ascendancy over the animal and vegetable world has, after all, been a basic precondition of human history. The way in which we have rationalized and questioned that ascendancy is a large and daunting theme which in recent years has received a good deal of attention from philosophers, theologians, geographers and literary critics. The issues raised here are even more alive today than they were just ten years ago. Preserving the environment, saving the rain forests, and preventing the extinction of species may seem like fairly recent concerns, however, Man and the Natural World explores how these ideas took root long ago. Topics include debates on human uniqueness, animal souls, the rights of trees, and the ethics of meat eating. These issues have much to offer not only environmental activists, but historians as well, for it is impossible to disentangle what the people of the past thought about plants and animals from what they thought about themselves.

ISBN-13: 9780844669113
ISBN-10: 0844669113
Publication Date: 7/1997
Rating:

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: Peter Smith Publisher Inc
Book Type: Hardcover
Other Versions: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
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