L’idée de nature du Moyen Âge à nos jours : une harmonie dissonante

The idea of nature is examined here from different angles: as a product of divine action, nature is good, but also impenetrable to the gaze of the knowing subject, who tries to appropriate its essence through a process of classification and naming that has continued down through the centuries. At the same time the idea of nature proves to be inseparable not only from the state of culture, but also from political theory, starting from the reflection that from 15th century Italy spread across Europe, questioning the superiority of a monarchic regime considered until then “natural” because it reflected the structure of the Ptolemaic universe. At the same time, political activity and, more generally, human action began to appear contrary to natural happiness in a movement that from the 15th century has reached the present day. On the other hand, the impenetrability of nature is also a source of anxiety: its mechanism reproduces itself eternally and inexorably without compassion for the creatures it generates. Conversely, in romantic and decadent poetry nature is a paradigmatic reference, which nevertheless appears inseparable from the subject that interiorizes it, thus giving up on knowing it, while, on the other hand, artistic theory feeds on the concept of language as natural expression, capable of revealing nature’s rational laws, but also its incessant cycle, its magmatic force and its inexplicable impulses. Moreover, the foundational value of myth, recovered, reinvented, reinterpreted, up to the most recent literary expressions, seems to unify the diffuse fragments of an ever more compromised relationship between man and nature in postmodern society.

About the Authors
Donatella Bisconti is a professor of Italian language, literature and civilization at the University of Clermont-Auvergne. As a member of the IHRIM-ENS of Lyon, she regularly collaborates with Paris3’s CERUM. She has published essays on Dante, Boccaccio, Alberti, the Pulci brothers, and the Laurentian age. She specializes in particular in the development of political theory in the 15th century and the redefinition of the intellectual's relationship with power in the crucial passage to the modern age.

Cristina Schiavone is a French language and translation researcher at the University of Macerata (Humanities Department). She directs the binational master's degree (dual Italian-French diploma) in "Lingue moderne per la comunicazione e la cooperazione internazionale" (LM-38) - University of Macerata - and Master’s in 'Etudes interculturelles franco-itallennes' (EIFI), - Université Clermont-Auvergne. Her research areas are: francophony, sociolinguistic variation, plurilingualism, otherness and identity, translation and linguistic rights in the Sub-Saharan Francophone area.