Results by title

A critic once wrote that Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon was about two things: Yugoslavia and everything else. Something similar might be said about Clear Creek. In this boundary-defying work, Erik Reece spends a year beside the stream in his rural Kentucky homeplace, tracking the movements of the seasons, the animals, and the thoughts passing through his mind.

Clear Creek is a series of vignettes that calls us out of our frenzied, digitized world to a slower, more contemplative way of being. Reece’s subjects range from solitude and solidarity to the intricacies of forest communities, and from the genius of songwriter Tom T. Hall to reforestation projects on abandoned strip mines. A work of close observation and carefully grounded insights, Clear Creek articulates a nature-based philosophy for pondering humanity’s current plight.

In her Letters on Natural Philosophy, published originally in Krakow in 1584, Camilla Erculiani proposed her new theory of the natural causes of the universal flood in the biblical book of Genesis. Erculiani weaves together her understanding of Aristotelian, Platonic, Galenic, and astrological traditions and combines them with her own observations of the world as seen from her apothecary shop in sixteenth-century Padua. This publication brought Erculiani to the attention of the Inquisition, which accused her of heresy, silencing her for centuries.

 This edition presents the first full English translation of Erculiani’s book and other relevant texts, bringing to light the cultural context and scientific thought of this unique natural philosopher.

Honorius Augustodunensis (“of Regensburg”), born perhaps in the 1070s, was a native son of southern Germany or Austria who pursued his studies in England with St. Anselm of Canterbury. Under Anselm’s influence he became a Benedictine monk before returning to Germany in the opening years of the twelfth century. During his life-long monastic career he blossomed as a prolific writer. He died around 1140. The epithet “of Autun,” as a translation of “Augustodunensis,” was applied to him by scholars a century ago and earlier, but it has long been discredited, and the meaning of “Augustodunensis” remains a mystery. Although Honorius has been appropriately described as an enigmatic figure, his strong influence on Western theologians is widely recognized. Despite his large corpus, now known to consist of approximately thirty texts (but almost certainly more) Honorius Augustodunensis is the most unjustly neglected writer of the twelfth- century renaissance. Although he is best known as a popularizer, he also composed a major philosophical text, The Key to Natural Philosophy (Clavis physicae), ca. 1125-30. Taking the form of a dialogue between master and disciple, the Clavis is an abridged paraphrase of Eriugena’s Periphyseon, the most radical work of Neoplatonic thought in the time frame between pseudo-Dionysius and Meister Eckhart. Honorius treats such topics as the unknowability of God, apophatic and cataphatic theology, the primordial causes, the cosmological process of creation and return, human and angelic nature, the Fall, the four elements, and the findings of ancient astronomers. Although Eriugena was condemned for heresy in the thirteenth century, Honorius managed to escape that censure. The Key to Natural Philosophy thus became the chief conduit of the Carolingian philosopher’s thought in the later Middle Ages, influencing readers from Eckhart through Nicholas of Cusa.

In this volume, distinguished scholar Edward Grant identifies the vital elements that contributed to the creation of a widespread interest in natural philosophy, which has been characterized as the "Great Mother of the Sciences."