The Marvels of the World: An Anthology of Nature Writing Before 1700, ed. Rebecca Bushnell. Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021, xii, 363 pp., 35 b/w ill.

Abstract

After Rebecca Bushnell had taught a graduate course in 2017 dedicated to the early modern English discourse on nature and natural history, she realized the great need for a solid anthology of relevant texts, and the book under review represents the result of her extensive efforts to collect and edit important contributions by philosophers, mystics, and poets from late antiquity to the high and late Middle Ages, and especially from ca. 1500 until ca. 1700, addressing the following subject matters: 1. natural philosophy and natural knowledge; 2. plants; 3. animals; 4. weather, climate, and seasons; 5. inhabiting the land; 6. gardens and gardening; and 7. outlandish natural worlds. This is already an impressive gamut of important topics, but I am sorely missing aspects such as ‘water,’ ‘forests,’ ‘mountains,’ ‘birds,’ ‘fish,’ and then the inner (caves, volcanoes, etc.) and also the outer sphere, the stars, the planets, and the moon.