Review of The Culture of Nature in Britain, 1680-1860
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Ritvo_The Culture.pdf
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94.17 KB
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Adobe PDF
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Author(s)
Ritvo, Harriet
Date Issued
April 2011
Journal
American Historical Review
Publisher
University of Chicago Press
Citation
Ritvo, Harriet. “P. M. Harman . The Culture of Nature in Britain, 1680–1860 . New Haven : Yale University Press . 2009 . Pp. Xi, 393. $65.00.” The American Historical Review 116.2 (2011): 514–514.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
The title of P. M. Harman's sweeping survey strongly recalls that of Keith Thomas's pioneering Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (1983). And in a sense, the two books treat the same topic, although with large differences that cannot easily be attributed either to the progress of scholarship in the last quarter century or to the fact that Harman, unlike Thomas, is a historian of science. Perhaps the explanation lies simply in Raymond Williams's famous assertion that “nature” is one of the most complex words in the English language (Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society [1976]). Thomas's nature is concrete, robustly composed of its constituent animals, vegetables, and minerals. Harman's nature is more ethereal, embodied in the ideas of philosophers, writers, and artists. The structure of this book is thematic, with chapters on design, exploration, landscape (two), …
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Humanities. History Section
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.116.2.514
