A collection of essays describing the historical connection between nature and society.

Introduction; 1. Knowledge of nature and society Ernest Gellner; 2. Two conceptions of the world in Greek and Roman thought Jan Janko; 3. Byzantine fools: the link between nature and society Lenos Mavrommatis; 4. The 'chaotic spaces' of medieval madness: thoughts on the English and Welsh experience Chris Philo; 5. On the perception of nature in Renaissance society Gerhard Jaritz and Verena Winiwarter; 6. Fables of the bees: a case-study on views of nature and society Peter Burke; 7. The earth's fertility as a social fact in early modern England Simon Schaffer; 8. The island and history of environmentalism: the case of St. Vincent Richard Grove; 9. Art and nature in pre-classical economics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Lars Herlitz; 10. The urban and the rustic in Enlightenment London Roy Porter; 11. Science, society and culture in the Romantic naturforschung around 1800 Dietrich von Engelhardt; 12. The anti-Romantic Romantics: nature, knowledge, and identity in nineteenth-century Norway Nina Witoszek; 13. The wordy worship of nature and the tacit feeling for nature in the history of German forestry Joachim Radaku; 14. 'Let us begin with the weather': climate, race and cultural distinctiveness in the American south Mart A. Stewart; 15. Wild West imagery and landscape perception in nineteenth-century USA Gerhard Strohmeier; 16. On human nature: Darwin and the anthropologists Adam Kuper; 17. The siren of evolutionary ethics: Darwin to Wilson Paul Farber; 18. Mapping the human genome in the light of history Mikulas Teich; 19. The way the world is going: the society-nature dichotomy in development rhetorics Bengt-Erik Borgström; 20. Nature and economy Bo Gustafsson; 21. The nature of morality and the morality of nature: problems of normative natural philosophy Kurt Bayerz.