Long before the Romantics embraced nature, people in the West saw the human and nonhuman worlds as both intimately interdependent and violently antagonistic. With its peerless selection of ninety-eight original sources concerned with the natural world and humankind's place within it, The Marvels of the World offers a corrective to the still-prevalent tendency to dismiss premodern attitudes toward nature as simple or univocal. Gathering together medical texts, herbals, and how-to books, as well as scientific, religious, philosophical, and poetic works dating from antiquity to the dawn of the Enlightenment, the anthology explores both mainstream and unconventional thinking about the natural world. Its seven parts focus on philosophy and science; plants; animals; weather and climate; ways of inhabiting the land; gardens and gardening; and European encounters with the wider world. Each section and each of the book's selections is prefaced with a helpful introduction by volume editor Rebecca Bushnell that weaves connections among these compelling pieces of the past. The early writers collected here wrote with extraordinary openness about ways of coexisting with the nonhuman forces that shaped them, Bushnell demonstrates, even as they sought to control and exploit their environment. Taken as a whole, The Marvels of the World reveals how many of these early writers cared as much about the natural world as we do today. "[A]n invaluable addition to the growing list of anthologies on this topic, not least because it offers an unusually expansive scope (Antiquity to 1700), but also because its contextual material is enormously readable and informative; each section provides a solid grounding in nature writing that situates the readings topically and with a sense of their position in time and place… Bushnell’s anthology serves to rewrite natural history in important ways, shifting the usual narratives. It also demonstrates how the teleology of human interactions with the landscapes they inhabit is as uncertain, perhaps even as unpredictable, as the particulars of the seasons themselves; and it illustrates how that natural history was inscribed in the soil as well as on the page, by those who toiled as well as those who imagined." ― Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment "Rebecca Bushnell’s anthology offers its readers 112 excerpts of nature writing from antiquity through the late seventeenth century. The product of a seminar she taught at the University of Pennsylvania, this collection of sources immerses readers in a well-curated collection...[T]he very premise of the volume invites us to contemplate genres of writing about nature across the centuries. Bushnell has done a scholarly service by sharing her own work as a teacher of premodern nature writing." ― Speculum Rebecca Bushnell is the School of Arts and Sciences Board of Overseers Emerita Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens among other books. Introduction In the first century of the Common Era, the Roman writer Pliny the Elder composed a massive natural history in thirty-seven books covering astronomy, geology, zoology, botany, and minerology and embracing all areas of concern for human existence. The work begins by ecstatically praising earth's indulgence of humankind: She receives us at our birth, nourishes us when born, and ever afterwards supports us; lastly, embracing us in her bosom when we are rejected by the rest of nature, she then covers us with especial tenderness. . . . The water passes into showers, is concreted into hail, swells into rivers, is precipitated in torrents; the air is condensed into clouds, rages in squalls; but the earth, kind, mild, and indulgent as she is, and always ministering to the wants of mortals, how many things do we compel her to produce spontaneously! What odors and flowers, nutritive juices, forms and colors! With what good faith does she render back all that has been entrusted to her! In the same passage, Pliny then condemns those who abuse that earth, complaining that "everything which the earth has produced, as a remedy for our evils, we have converted into the poison of our lives," for "she is continually tortured for her iron, her timber, stone, fire, corn" in our pursuit of superfluous wealth. Then, "inasmuch as all this wealth ends in crimes, slaughter, and war, and that, while we drench her with our blood, we cover her with unburied bones; and being covered with these and her anger being thus appeased, she conceals the crimes of mortals which leads to crime and bloodshed, the expression of earth's anger" (Pliny, Part 1). In this short span Pliny thus highlights the contradictions that inform so much of our experience of the natural world. We wonder at the earth's extraordinary abundance and variety, how "many things" she generates in a dizzying array of forms, smells, and colors, while complacent in o