The Middle Ages and their landscapes are the implicit, rather than the direct, subject of this essay. Through an ex negativo consideration of medieval presuppositions and perspectives on landscapes, the essay shows why the concept of ‘nature as landscape’ was only truly conceivable in the modern period: a fact which has led to certain blind spots in the scholarly examination of landscapes in both the modern and medieval periods.

The following treatise starts off with one of the most famous passages of occidental literature, the beginning of Dante Alighieri′s,Divine Comedy'. Dante models his protagonist′s straying in the selva oscura on the courtly novel, but as one would expect, he does not confine himself to that. Dante′s wood is a complex metaphor for man′s path of life. But not least, it also functions as a hermeneutic metaphor for the apories of reading and for the difficulties of an exegesis, which must (...) leave its text a part of its obscurity. (shrink)