Engaging with Nature: Essays on the Natural World in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

In ''Inventing with Animals in the Middle Ages'' he draws examples from bestiaries and literature to present the idea that anthropomorphized animals served a variety of purposes such as showing human limitations or representing some races as less than human. The remaining piece on medieval nature relies on a wide range of sources including historical climate records and contemporary writings on medieval diet and population. The final essay, on the other hand, is a broad-ranging work by Julie Hochstrasser that manages to clarify a complex set of contributions to the study of plants, animals, and people in seventeenth-century Dutch Brazil.