Nature in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Times: Exploration of a Critical Relationship, ed. Albrecht Classen. Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture, 29. Berlin and Boston: Waltere Gruyter, 2024, 597 pp., 17 ill.

This is a rich and substantial volume consisting of eighteenth essays investigating the multifarious and thought-provoking aspects of the intricate relationship between human and nature, as crystallized in a broad range of medieval and early modern European literary traditions. With the contributors ranging from established scholars and early-career researchers based in the US, Continental Europe, and notably Central Europe, the corpus dealt with here, accordingly, also includes both masterpieces that never lack critical attention (like the Old English heroic poem Beowulf and Middle English romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) and the scarcely discussed – yet by no means less significant – texts, such as the Pestbücher composed in fourteenth-century Middle High German, the newly edited travelogue referred to as Niederrheinische Orientbebricht, and some fascinating sources in the Czech language. In so doing, the editor effectively balances the uneven distribution of scholarly focus that, for the time being, is partially more centered on the Anglophone tradition of premodern studies, especially in the scholarly terrain of medieval and early modern eco-criticism and the Environmental Humanities. The broad range of themes tackled in this volume is reflective of the editor’s intellectual inclusiveness to the diverse medieval sources which are yet to be properly incorporated into cross-disciplinary re-interpretation.