An Ecocritical Evaluation of Book XI of the Florentine Codex

Abstract

There exists a popular misconception that Western societies have only been concerned about the environment in the last several decades. In this time we have begun to witness firsthand some of the effects of rapid ecological change and destruction and realize that the destruction of the habit of nonhuman creatures is directly tied to the destruction of our own way of life. Nonetheless issues of environment and environmental degradation were more pointed for human beings living in prior centuries, since their lives and livelihoods were tied more directly to the natural world. The many varied natural histories composed in antiquity and through the early modern period stand as testimony to Western societies’ interest in Nature and its interaction with human culture. Understanding and writing about the natural world became an even greater intellectual enterprise in sixteenth-century Europe as the understanding of human anatomy and physiology developed and as ancient medical texts lost some of their authority. Increased knowledge of the body paralleled the exploration of nature and the move toward revising the wisdom of antiquity sent doctors and herbalists into the fields and forests to find out for themselves what was there. The invention of the telescope and its inverted twin the microscope had learned individuals scrutinizing the natural world, both at a distance and in the everyday, in ways that had never been possible before. On the planetary level the voyages of discovery, first carried out by the Spanish and Portuguese and then closely followed by their northern European neighbors, brought cultures that were totally unprepared for a new global reality into contact with each other.