Ithaca College

 “The Exemplary Environment of Bartholomaeus Anglicus” was recently published in Reading the Natural World in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Thomas Willard, Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 46 (Turnhout, BE: Brepols, 2020), pp. 71-88.

In his essay, Michael examines the representation of nature in Bartholomaeus’s De Proprietatibus Rerum (“On the Properties of Things”), the most widely known encyclopedia of nature during the Middle Ages. It was studied in English schools before the Protestant Reformation, and it was a resource for scholars, preachers, and literary authors. Michael’s essay argues that by treating nature as a vehicle for spiritual reflection rather than as a place of physical habitation, Bartholomaeus’s allegories and moralities helped define a Western ideology of nature that renders it either symbolic or instrumental. Ultimately, De proprietatibus rerum helped to foster the anthropocentrism that modern environmentalists cite as major problems in the human relationship with the environment.