Book Reviews | 637

The Promise of Wilderness joins several other excellent works con-

cerning wilderness in William Cronon’s Weyerhaeuser series. As
Cronon himself points out in the preface, the series now contains
“an accidental trilogy” exploring wilderness politics in the twentieth
century, the first two volumes being Paul Sutter’s Driven Wild (Univer-
sity of Washington Press, 2002) and Mark Harvey’s Wilderness Forever

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(University of Washington Press, 2005). Of course, Cronon famously
explicated “The Trouble with Wilderness” in an influential 1995 essay
(discussed briefly in The Promise of Wilderness), so it may seem ironic
that he has shepherded into publication so many books dedicated to
the topic. But what is truly ironic is that environmental historians
have worn so many paths through the wilderness while there is so
much work yet to be done in places where humans are not just
visitors.

David Stradling
University of Cincinnati
doi: 10.1093/envhis/emt057
Advance Access published on May 6, 2013

The Medieval Discovery of Nature. Steven A. Epstein. New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2012. xiii + 208 pp. Table, notes,
bibliography, and index. Cloth $95.00.

The Medieval Discovery of Nature explores the various ways in which

people in the Middle Ages arrived at notions of inheritability and
notions of “like producing like” in nature. Put another way, Epstein’s
text seeks out the proto-naturalists who arrived at ideas of inheritabil-
ity foreshadowing those of modern biology and genetics, and he
argues that proto-Darwinian ideas on inheritability show up in a sur-
prising range of discourses. Chapter 1 examines inheritability’s pres-
ence in medieval discussions of grafting. Chapter 2 explores the
concept’s connection to animal hybrids like mules. Chapter 3
focuses on the inheritability of sin. Chapter 4 looks at the inheritabil-
ity of nature in terms of private property and human slaves. And the
final chapter examines how “calamitous nature . . . produces disasters”
(p. 149).
The Medieval Discovery of Nature continues the scholarly trend of
revealing how complexly people in the Middle Ages thought about
nature, an era whose views on the natural world are often reduced to
what well-known saints like Augustine and Aquinas wrote. One of
the strengths of this book is Epstein’s devotion to the idea that scholars
638 | Environmental History 18 (July 2013)

have relied too much on the theological tradition when studying

medieval views on nature. Instead, Epstein tries to seek out what
ideas peasants like those who “drew the food supply from Nature
put down” (p. 16). Epstein, in short, strives to treat the breeder and
the farmer as equally authoritative about nature as the saint and the
theologian. Thus, in an interesting section of Chapter 1, Epstein exam-

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ines the writings of the revered Dominican theologian Albertus
Magnus for evidence that he relied at times on falconers, whalers,
and other vulgus (common people) for his vast knowledge of nature.
However, despite Epstein’s attempts to complicate our understand-
ing of medieval views on nature, overall the experience of reading
this monograph can be a frustrating one, due in large part to its fre-
quent lack of focus. A couple of examples will be representative of
the book’s struggles with maintaining focus.
In an early chapter entitled “The Medieval Discover of Nature,”
which “examine[s] the medieval recovery of ancient ideas about
Nature and practices like grafting” (p. 39), Epstein ends by discussing
two authors: Gaspare Tagliacozzi and St. Francis of Assisi. Tagliacozzi,
Epstein informs us, is the author of a 1597 Italian treatise whose title
translates as Concerning surgery on the maimed by grafting. As Epstein
recognizes, “[t]his is not the place for a long excursus into the
origins of what is really plastic surgery” (p. 34). However, even
though Epstein avoids the prolonged excursus on proto-plastic
surgery, he indulges in a short one that still ends up feeling superflu-
ous, for Epstein’s discussion fails to point out what, if anything, the
Italian surgeon learned about nature through his experiments in
skin grafting. Put simply, the digression on Tagliacozzi is interesting
but appears irrelevant to Epstein’s overall interest in “the medieval dis-
covery of nature.”
And after the excursion into Tagliacozzi, Epstein then turns to
St. Francis of Assisi because, he tells us, a “close look at some well-
known stories about Francis and Nature illuminates important
themes in our approach to the problem of inheritability” (p. 35).
What follows, however, is quite literally a list of examples from Fran-
cis’s two most important biographers, Thomas of Celano and
St. Bonaventure, that show Francis’s “relations to animals” (p. 36).
This list of animal-related moments in Thomas and Bonaventure,
however, is followed by no analysis and no clear connection back to
the book’s central concerns with issues of inheritability and “discover-
ies” of nature. In short, the whole St. Francis section feels tacked on
and, like the Tagliacozzi section, wholly irrelevant. Unfortunately,
Epstein’s study often loses focus through such digressions as those
just described.
Overall, The Medieval Discovery of Nature has much to teach its
readers, for Epstein clearly possesses an impressive breadth of knowl-
edge on the Middle Ages that is on full display in this book.
 Book Reviews | 639

However, the author struggles in this work to rein in that breadth, and
to maintain as sharp of a focus on the topics of nature and inheritabil-
ity as he could have.

Jeremy Withers
Iowa State University

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doi: 10.1093/envhis/emt060
Advance Access published on May 6, 2013

Climate and Catastrophe in Cuba and the Atlantic World in the

Age of Revolution. By Sherry Johnson. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2011. xiii + 306 pp. Illustrations, maps, appendices,
notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $39.95.

While historians are often reluctant to attribute any role to

climate, this book breaks new ground in its assessment of the signifi-
cance of climate-related disasters in Cuba and the repercussions
they had on nearby French and British colonies in the second part
of the eighteenth century. After a presentation of previous scholar-
ship and of the theoretical framework underpinning the book, as
well as a discussion of scientific data, the author follows a broadly
chronological sequence. She first challenges the traditional inter-
pretation attributing the fall of Havana to the British in 1762 to
the ill-prepared Spanish troops and leadership. Johnson instead
blames the weather: “for 12 years prior to the war, alternating
periods of drought and hurricanes led to food shortages and
sickness. . . . Fever, long the Spaniard’s ally, became their adversary”
(p. 41). J. R. McNeill’s book Mosquito Empires, not cited, established
earlier that malaria and yellow fever did not play their usual role of
protection against invaders in this particular case. After the return
of Havana to Spain in 1763, Cuba was plagued by recurrent food
shortages, particularly of flour. The challenge was exacerbated by
bad weather, which accounts in Johnson’s narrative for the conver-
sion of the Spanish administration to the liberalization of trade. A
devastating hurricane season in 1772 in particular compelled
Spanish authorities to relax import rules for Cuba. This opening
up of trade had important consequences because lucrative trade
with the Spanish Empire increased the confidence of the Thirteen
Colonies to seek independence from Britain. Powerful interests in
Spain and Cuba, however, continued to press for a return to the
old mercantilist rules. These lobbies succeeded in closing Cuban
ports just as the Spanish troops became involved in the Haitian