Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800 - Softcover

Thomas, Sir Keith

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140146865 ISBN 13: 9780140146868

Publisher: Penguin, 1991

Synopsis

'Man and the Natural World, an encyclopaedic study of man's relationship to animals and plants, is completely engrossing ... It explains everything - why we eat what we do, why we plant this and not that, why we keep pets, why we like some animals and not others, why we kill the things we kill and love the things we love ... It is often a funny book and one to read again and again' Paul Theroux, Sunday Times

'The English historian Keith Thomas has revealed modes of thought and ways of life deeply strange to us' Hilary Mantel, New York Review of Books

'A treasury of unusual historical anecdote ... a delight to read and a pleasure to own' Auberon Waugh, Sunday Telegraph

'A dense and rich work ... the return to the grass roots of our own environmental convictions is made by the most enchantingly minor paths' Ronald Blythe, Guardian

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Preserving the environment, saving the rain forests, and preventing the extinction of species may seem like fairly recent concerns, but in Man and the Natural World, Sir Keith Thomas explores how these ideas took root long ago. In this entertaining and illuminating history, Thomas aims not just to explain present interest in preserving the environment and protecting the rights of animals, but to reconstruct an earlier mental world as well. Throughout the ages humankind has attempted to rationalize its place in nature. At no time was the idea of exploiting the earth for our own advantage so sharply challenged as in England between the sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries. For it was during these years that there occurred a whole cluster of changes in the way in which men and women, at all social levels, perceived the natural world around them. Thomas seeks to expose the assumptions which underlay the views and feelings of the inhabitants of early modern England toward the animals, birds, vegetation, and physical landscape among which they spent their lives. The issues raised here are even more alive today than they were just ten years ago. This fascinating work deftly shows that it is impossible to disentangle what the people of the past thought about plants and animals from what they thought about themselves.

About the Author:

Keith Thomas is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He was formerly President of Corpus Christi College and, before that, Professor of Modern History and Fellow of St John's College. RELIGION AND DECLINE OF MAGIC, his first book, won one of the two Wolfson Literary Awards for History in 1972. He was knighted in 1988 for services to the study of history.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0140146865
• ISBN 13: 9780140146868
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 432