This text provides a study of the attitudes of town-dwellers in the Middle Ages to nature, their surroundings and the human body. Fumagalli describes the natural landscape of Italy in the early Middle Ages as a sinister wilderness of dense forest and ruined towns, destroyed in the barbarian invasions or abandoned after a long decline. He shows how, in a period of growth in the 9th century, Italian towns became significant centres of power and their populations set out to restore their sense of superiority over the wild countryside and its peasant inhabitants. He describes how the draining and...