Historians and cultural critics face special challenges when treating the nonhuman natural world in the medieval and early modern periods. Their most daunting problem is that in both the visual and written records of the time, nature seems to be both everywhere and nowhere. In the broadest sense, nature was everywhere, for it was vital to human survival. Agriculture, animal husbandry, medicine, and the patterns of human settlement all have their basis in natural settings. Humans also marked personal, community, and seasonal events by natural occurrences and built their cultural...

The essays in Living Dangerously, written by some of the leading scholars in the fields of history and literature, examine the lives of those who lived on the margins of medieval and early modern European society. While some essays explore obvious marginalized classes, such as criminals, gypsies, and prostitutes, others challenge traditional understandings of the margin by showing that female mystics, speculators in the Dutch mercantile empire, and writers of satire, for example, could fall into the margins. These essays reveal the symbiotic relationship that exists between the...