This volume, which began life as a series of papers presented at the twenty-fourth annual conference of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) in 2018, brings together an introduction, a first section on “Perspectives” (two chapters), a second section on “The Medieval World” (six chapters), and a third on “The Early Modern World” (five chapters). As the introduction notes, there is a “certain continuity” due to the “European perspective” (xiv), but the contributions are probably best appreciated if their variegation is embraced, for this is indeed a rich and mottled medley.

Section 1 offers “two perspectives on approaches to the environment in pre-modern writing” (xv): the first, by Michael Bintley, brings to his study of Anglo-Saxon land charters the concept of the “exogram” (borrowed from Karl Spencer Lashley); the second, by Albrecht Classen, studies rivers in the works of Wolfram von Eschenbach, concluding that they “not only delineate a geophysical map but also trace the map of human existence” (34).

The rest of the volume is organized chronologically, going from Anglo-Saxon poetry to Shakespeare. Chapters focused on the Middle Ages are by Todd Preston (on birds of the genus Corvus in Old English literature), by Emma Knowles (on the biblical book of Daniel), by Michael W. Twomey (on Bartholomeus Anglicus), Lori J. Ultsch (on snakes in Dante's Inferno), Tiffany Nicole White (on the Icelandic saga of Áli Flekkr), and Rebekah Lynn Pratt-Sturges (on Gaston Fébus's hunting manual, the Livre de chasse). Twomey's study of the thirteenth-century encyclopedic De proprietatibus rerum stands out: it shows how the author's bookishness—Pliny, Isidore de Seville, and newly available Arabic material—leads him to represent a natural world as an “exemplary environment” that is rather alienated from the real one, foreshadowing the “Western alienation from nature” (87). Pratt-Sturges's chapter discusses the Livre de chasse's miniatures, reproduced in color, showing how they “transform the artificiality of the medieval park into a perceived natural state where humans reign supreme” (120), connecting physical spaces and social practices, thus making a similar compelling point to Twomey—namely, how representations of nature all too often keep the physical world at a distance, something “constructed out of nature but not natural” (136).

Chapters focused on the early modern period are by Sarah H. Beckjord (on Oviedo's chronicle), Catherine Schultz McFarland (on the mountainous landscapes of Pieter Bruegel the Elder), Jennifer Bess (on horses and horsemanship in Philip Sidney), and two essays on Shakespeare, the first by Grace Tiffany (on forests and trees in Titus Andronicus, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and As You Like It), and the second by Seth Swanner (on nonhuman voices in Macbeth). Beckjord's chapter on Oviedo's description of Nicaragua is welcome and, building beyond Antonello Gerbi's foundational Nature in the New World (1975, trans. 1985), shows the complexity of Oviedo's self-aware practices. McFarland's study of The Suicide of Saul and The Conversion of Paul, paintings in which “the landscape itself becomes almost a protagonist” (160), such that the “immensity of the settings . . . dwarfs the subjects” (161), is carefully argued and teeming with eco-lessons: “The mountains loom over the human beings until they seem crushed by the power of a God who seems not to care about the puny dramas of these pitiful protagonists” (169). Tiffany's chapter on Shakespeare's savage trees pushes past a certain notion that Shakespeare's woodlands might be “benevolent places” to realign them more with the “threatening woods of European folk tales and medieval romance” (197), a thought to be set aside Vin Nardizzi's Wooden Os.

For the most part, Reading the Natural World is not—and does not claim to be—a volume in urgent dialogue with contemporary ecocriticism, and the editor's passing comment that one chapter takes up the “relatively recent field of animal studies” (xvi, emphasis mine) indeed suggests just such a distance from present theoretical debates. This distance in no way minimizes the interest and importance of the contributions, however, all of which shed new bright light on the literary and artistic works they study.