Includes index

Contents: Introduction: 1: Knowledge of nature and society -- 2: Two conceptions of the world in Greek and Roman thought:cyclicity and degeneration -- 3: Byzantine fools: the link between nature and society -- 4: The 'chaotic spaces' of medieval madness: thoughts on the English and Welsh experience -- 5: On the perception of nature in a Renaissance society -- 6: Fables of the bees: a case-study on views of nature and society -- 7: The earth's fertility as a social fact in early modern England -- 8: The island and the history of environmentalism: the case of St Vincent -- 9: Art and nature in pre-classical economics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries -- 10: The urban and the rustic in enlightenment London -- 11: Science, society and culture in the romantic -- 12: The anti-romantic tomantics: nature, knowledge and identity -- 13: The wordy worship of nature and the tacit feeling for nature in the history of German forestry -- 14: 'Let us begin with the weather': climate, race and cultural distinctiveness in the American south -- 15: Wild west imagery: landscape perception in nineteenth-century America -- 16: On human nature: Darwin and the anthropologists -- 17: The nature of morality and the morality of nature: problems of normative natural philosophy.