English Language and Literature Commons^™

Review Of Back To Nature: The Green And The Real In The Late Renaissance, By Robert N. Watson, Elizabeth Spiller

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Robert Watsons Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance identifies the Renaissance as the moment of an "absolutely fundamental change in its consensual interpretation of reality" (41). Fear that material reality obscures true knowledge ("things getting in the way of the Word") gave way to concern that words and other forms of human perception were key impediments to truth or knowledge ("words getting in the way of Things") (41). This decentering of medieval religious epistemology made itself felt across the arts and sciences of late Renaissance culture and brought with it a compensatory need to …