In “Speak to the earth and it will teach you”, C3 member PETER KEVERN is seeking to recover the wisdom of the mediaeval Bestiaries to rethink our relationship to the natural world.

Professor Peter Kevern is a theologian whose research focuses on the influence religious ideas and images have on our individual and social wellbeing. He is currently working on a project to use the thinking behind the mediaeval Bestiaries to inform our response to the ecological crisis.

The mediaeval Bestiaries were books of ‘beasts’, often imaginatively written and richly illustrated. Although they are often treated as manuals of early (and very inaccurate) natural history, they are more concerned with theology and ethics. In most examples, each creature is considered to display some deep truth about human beings, God, or good and evil, meaning that can be discerned by thoughtful reflection on the creature’s properties and behaviour.

The Bestiaries emerge out of a world where human beings were inseparably linked to creation and believed the natural world to be charged throughout with deepest meaning and wisdom. In an age when our alienation from the natural world is bringing it, and us, to the brink of collapse, the pattern of thought behind the Bestiaries may have something to teach us.

“In this project I seek to recover some elements of that pattern, and apply them to creatures (such as viruses, slime moulds, black holes and Schrodinger’s cat) which were undreamt of by our forebears. In the process I hope to recover for our own time this sense of a world charged with meaning, and develop a set of practices that respond to its prompting.”

Contact Peter Kevern or the C3 Centre at C3Centre@staffs.ac.uk if you want to know more.