Fragmented Nature: Medieval Latinate Reasoning on the Natural World and Its Order

This volume examines a plurality of problems, theories, and images of the order and regularity that medieval philosophers and practitioners saw as structuring the natural world. Such richness of perspectives is directly bound to the plurality of epistemes of nature that characterised European philosophy and science in the Middle Ages and to the specificities of the case-studies discussed by the contributors. While most medieval thinkers agreed on considering nature as an ordered structure of interactions, any glimpse of such structure had its own coordinates. Different domains engaged with nature according to their own methods and assumptions. Consideration of a diverse set of animals or plants may lead to diverse sets of features and theories. And the reading of an authoritative text could apport very different ideas in one period and another, in one tradition and its competitor. Yet in all these cases, philosophers and practitioners not only looked at nature appreciating its order, but had to order themselves nature in return, prescribing (and proscribing) rules, texts, behaviours, and narratives. Hence, the natural order of the universe is based on the theoretical reordering of data, solutions, and theories by interested practitioners.