Author Description

An exploration of nature in the poetry of late antiquity. Nature engaged late ancient authors in a variety of ways. It produced sheer wonder at its strange beauty, but it also provoked complex readings that treated it as a cache of riddles that needed to be deciphered. Beginning with the Hellenistic "Physika" (literary compendia of the elements of nature often arranged alphabetically) and continuing through the late ancient Christian genre of the Hexaemeron (commentaries on the six days of creation in the book of Genesis), interpreters surveyed the natural world for the wisdom it has to offer. Generally animals claimed attention in this period not as objective specimens to be classified scientifically but rather as indicators of a dynamic process that was defined both theologically and psychologically. The author calls this the "bestial imagination", and this is the focus of some of the essays in the book.