100 books like Possessing Nature

By Paula Findlen,

Here are 100 books that Possessing Nature fans have personally recommended if you like Possessing Nature. Shepherd is a community of 11,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of The Renaissance in Italy: A Social and Cultural History of the Rinascimento

Celeste McNamara Author Of The Bishop's Burden: Reforming the Catholic Church in Early Modern Italy

From my list on Renaissance Italy.

Why am I passionate about this?

I teach medieval and early modern European history at Dublin City University, with a particular interest in 16th-18th century Italian history. My own research focuses on the religious, legal, and popular culture of northern Italy, particularly Venice and the Veneto region. I became fascinated with Renaissance Italian history as an undergraduate at the College of William and Mary, and then went on to do a masters and a PhD at Northwestern University. I have taught at Northwestern, the College of William and Mary, the University of Warwick/Warwick in Venice, and the State University of New York at Cortland.

Celeste's book list on Renaissance Italy

Celeste McNamara Why did Celeste love this book?

This book is a fantastic, broad overview of the Italian Renaissance (or rinascimento, the term Ruggiero prefers and which his subjects would have recognized). The Italian Rinascimento was a period, according to Ruggiero, of vibrant cities, social change, and cultural expression, in which intellectuals, politicians, and artists both looked back to an idealized classical past and forward to uncharted territory.

I love the way this book focuses on issues that preoccupied the people he studies and incorporates topics often absent from works on the Renaissance, including women, sexuality, economics, disease and death, and religion, among others. Even more important, perhaps, is that it is clear, accessible, and engaging, and demonstrates a wealth of knowledge developed over an illustrious career as a historian of early modern Italy.

By Guido Ruggiero,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Renaissance in Italy as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This book offers a rich and exciting new way of thinking about the Italian Renaissance as both a historical period and a historical movement. Guido Ruggiero's work is based on archival research and new insights of social and cultural history and literary criticism, with a special emphasis on everyday culture, gender, violence and sexuality. The book offers a vibrant and relevant critical study of a period too long burdened by anachronistic and outdated ways of thinking about the past. Familiar, yet alien; pre-modern, but suggestively post-modern; attractive and troubling, this book returns the Italian Renaissance to center stage in our…


Book cover of Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta and Factions in Friuli During the Renaissance

Nicholas Scott Baker Author Of In Fortune's Theater: Financial Risk and the Future in Renaissance Italy

From my list on exploring what what Renaissance Italy was really like.

Why am I passionate about this?

I teach the histories of early modern Europe and European worlds at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. I developed a fascination for the period and, especially, for the Italian Renaissance as an undergraduate before going on to complete a PhD at Northwestern University in the United States. I love the contradictions and tensions of the period: a society and culture in transition from what we call medieval understandings and worldviews to what we see as more modern ones. These are some of the books that helped to fuel my passion for Renaissance Italian history and to answer some of my questions about what life was really like in Renaissance Italy.

Nicholas' book list on exploring what what Renaissance Italy was really like

Nicholas Scott Baker Why did Nicholas love this book?

This was another book that really inspired my choice of profession. Located in the northeast corner of the Italian peninsula, Friuli emerges as something like the wild west of Renaissance Italy in this engrossing study.

Far removed from the urbane cities and courts and the worlds of art and literature commonly associated with the Renaissance, Edward Muir reveals the continuing binds of feudal obligation, family, vengeance, and honor, and the violence they provoked in the early sixteenth century. Incidentally, the history he tells also encounters the real-life origins of the story that would become Romeo and Juliet.

Like Trexler, Muir explores the power of ritual in Renaissance Italian life, but rather than rituals of community and government, he focuses in this book on the rituals of aversion and violence.

By Edward Muir,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Mad Blood Stirring as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Nobles were slaughtered and their castles looted or destroyed, bodies were dismembered and corpses fed to animals-the Udine carnival massacre of 1511 was the most extensive and damaging popular revolt in Renaissance Italy (and the basis for the story of Romeo and Juliet). Mad Blood Stirring is a gripping account and analysis of this event, as well as the social structures and historical conflicts preceding it and the subtle shifts in the mentality of revenge it introduced. This new reader's edition offers students and general readers an abridged version of this classic work which shifts the focus from specialized scholarly…


Book cover of Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection

Celeste McNamara Author Of The Bishop's Burden: Reforming the Catholic Church in Early Modern Italy

From my list on Renaissance Italy.

Why am I passionate about this?

I teach medieval and early modern European history at Dublin City University, with a particular interest in 16th-18th century Italian history. My own research focuses on the religious, legal, and popular culture of northern Italy, particularly Venice and the Veneto region. I became fascinated with Renaissance Italian history as an undergraduate at the College of William and Mary, and then went on to do a masters and a PhD at Northwestern University. I have taught at Northwestern, the College of William and Mary, the University of Warwick/Warwick in Venice, and the State University of New York at Cortland.

Celeste's book list on Renaissance Italy

Celeste McNamara Why did Celeste love this book?

In spite of the impressive intellectual and scientific achievements of the Renaissance era, doctors and anatomists still had a very limited understanding of “women’s secrets,” that is, how the female body functioned. This era saw an increasing number of human dissections for medical study, but the vast majority of medical specimens were male, leading to an imbalance of knowledge.

In this captivating book, Park focuses on dissections of female bodies and the development of knowledge about the titular “secrets of women.” By expanding her study beyond university dissections to include those done in religious and domestic settings, she finds not only dissections of women’s bodies, but also dissections performed by women. The argument and analysis are sharp and incisive, it expands our understanding of early modern medicine, and the case studies of individual dissections are fascinating.

By Katherine Park,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Secrets of Women as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Toward the end of the Middle Ages, medical writers and philosophers began to devote increasing attention to what they called “women’s secrets,” by which they meant female sexuality and generation. At the same time, Italian physicians and surgeons began to open human bodies in order to study their functions and the illnesses that afflicted them, culminating in the great illustrated anatomical treatise of Andreas Vesalius, in 1543.

Katharine Park traces these two closely related developments through a series of case studies of women whose bodies were dissected after their deaths: an abbess, a lactating virgin, several patrician wives and mothers,…


Book cover of Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence

Celeste McNamara Author Of The Bishop's Burden: Reforming the Catholic Church in Early Modern Italy

From my list on Renaissance Italy.

Why am I passionate about this?

I teach medieval and early modern European history at Dublin City University, with a particular interest in 16th-18th century Italian history. My own research focuses on the religious, legal, and popular culture of northern Italy, particularly Venice and the Veneto region. I became fascinated with Renaissance Italian history as an undergraduate at the College of William and Mary, and then went on to do a masters and a PhD at Northwestern University. I have taught at Northwestern, the College of William and Mary, the University of Warwick/Warwick in Venice, and the State University of New York at Cortland.

Celeste's book list on Renaissance Italy

Celeste McNamara Why did Celeste love this book?

This book, now more than twenty years old, is still a key work in the history of sexuality. Rocke explores masculine culture in Renaissance Florence, focusing on seemingly rampant homoeroticism. He explores the topic from both proscriptive sources (sermons, laws, etc.) and through criminal trials against men accused of sodomy (as the practice was called). Contrary to what we might expect, he finds that sodomy was a relatively tolerated aspect of male culture, so long as it followed acceptable patterns. As with so much else in Renaissance Italy, here too the Florentines looked to the ancients, essentially recreating the ancient Greek form of pederasty, in which older elite men formed sexual relationships with adolescents, taking the “active” role with their younger partners. None of this challenged their masculinity or precluded heterosexual marriage; this was something different. Rocke’s study thus challenges us to rethink early modern sexuality as a spectrum, rather…

By Michael Rocke,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Forbidden Friendships as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In 1432, the Office of the Night was created specifically to police sodomy in Florence. Seventy years of denunciations, accusations, interrogations, and sentencings left an extraordinarily detailed record, which Rocke uses to its fullest in this richly documented portrait. He uncovers a culture in which sexual roles were strictly defined by age, with boys under eighteen the 'passive' participants in sodomy, youths in their twenties the 'active' participant, and men
in their thirties marrying women, their days of sexual frivolity over. This richly documented book paints a fascinating picture of a vibrant time and place and calls into question our…


Book cover of Going Back To Bisbee

Tom Zoellner Author Of Rim to River: Looking into the Heart of Arizona

From my list on books about Southern Arizona.

Why am I passionate about this?

I'm a fifth-generation Arizonan, a former staff writer for the Arizona Republic, and a lifelong student of the Grand Canyon State. One of my very favorite things to do is travel the backroads of this amazing state and talk with the astonishing people who live there. Along the way, I wrote eight nonfiction books, including Island on Fire, which won the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award. My day job is at Chapman University, where I am an English professor. 

Tom's book list on books about Southern Arizona

Tom Zoellner Why did Tom love this book?

I loved this road memoir by one of our most gentle and graceful writers, the poet Richard Shelton, who mentored hundreds of incarcerated writers in Arizona prisons.

He writes of a return to the “delightful maze” of the town of Bisbee, where he first worked as a teacher in 1956, a place where the old copper miner's shacks cling to the hillsides of the Mule Mountains as precariously as the villas on a Mediterranean island, and where the people have shrugged off life's hard punches as insouciantly as a prizefighter.

Resplendent with nature writing, you can practically smell the creosote on the sentences. I think this is one of the most tonally accurate volumes ever written about this region.

By Richard Shelton,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Going Back To Bisbee as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.


Book cover of Late Light

Helen Jukes Author Of A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings

From my list on reconnecting with nature.

Why am I passionate about this?

Nature has been a source of play, exploration, community, and solace for me since I was very young – as an adult, I find myself fascinated and alarmed by our species’ relations with the living world. Nature writing gives me a way of bringing my attention to this relationship and exploring it in a very close way. I often think of that well-worn phrase: We cannot protect what we do not love; we cannot love what we do not know. Literature, it seems to me, offers one route to better knowing and loving the world.

Helen's book list on reconnecting with nature

Helen Jukes Why did Helen love this book?

I found this a profoundly moving book. Late Light describes the author’s own journey, an Indonesian Australian making a home for himself in England, as he finds strange parallels opening up between his own life and the lives of the "unloved" animals he encounters.

Malay’s voice is intelligent, questioning, gentle, and meditative – quietly, movingly, he asks questions that reach through to the heart of what it means to be alive today.


By Michael Malay,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Late Light as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'Late Light brings the refreshing perspective of someone who goes from seeing England as a foreign place to someone who deeply studies its secret wonders. An astonishing read.' - Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

This is a book about falling in love with vanishing things

Late Light is the story of Michael Malay's own journey, an Indonesian Australian making a home for himself in England and finding strange parallels between his life and the lives of the animals he examines. Mixing natural history with memoir, this book explores the mystery of our animal neighbours, in all their richness and variety. It…


Book cover of One Midsummer's Day: Swifts and the Story of Life on Earth

Tom Mustill Author Of How to Speak Whale: The Power and Wonder of Listening to Animals

From my list on escaping into worlds of animal wonder.

Why am I passionate about this?

I was first a biologist, working with endangered species. Then I switched and spent fifteen years making nature documentaries with people like Greta Thunberg and David Attenborough. Then a humpback whale breached onto me when I was kayaking, this led to a life-changing adventure culminating in my becoming involved in efforts to use AI to translate the communications of whales! I wrote about this for my first book. My great passion was always reading and in becoming a writer I get to go deeper and more playfully into my favorite parts of filmmaking – following heroic and fascinating people on their adventures, reading hundreds of complicated scientific papers, and finding ways to connect these.

Tom's book list on escaping into worlds of animal wonder

Tom Mustill Why did Tom love this book?

I read this book thinking I'd learn about a speedy little 40g bird that never stops flying and that people used to think flew to the moon in winter.

But the book is a non-fiction love song to all life on earth that spins outward weaving together everything it has taken to make a world that could have swifts in it. It is literally wonder-ful and a masterpiece.

By Mark Cocker,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked One Midsummer's Day as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

It takes a whole universe to make one small black bird

The bestselling author of Crow Country and writer of The Guardian's Country Diary tells the story of all life on Earth through a single day spent in the company of swifts.

'A jewel of a book' Caroline Lucas MP

Swifts are among the most extraordinary of all birds. Their migrations span continents and their twelve-week stopover, when they pause to breed in European rooftops, is the very definition of summer. They may nest in our homes but much about their lives passes over our heads. No birds are more…


Book cover of The Snow Leopard

William deBuys Author Of The Trail To Kanjiroba: Rediscovering Earth in an Age of Loss

From my list on journeys of inner and outer discovery.

Why am I passionate about this?

Journeys of discovery are my favorite kind of story and my favorite vehicle for (mental) travel. From Gilgamesh to last week’s bestseller, they embody how we live and learn: we go somewhere, and something happens. We come home changed and tell the tale. The tales I love most take me where the learning is richest, perhaps to distant, exotic places—like Darwin’s Galapagos—perhaps deep into the interior of a completely original mind—like Henry Thoreau’s. I cannot live without such books. Amid the heartbreak of war, greed, disease, and all the rest, they remind me in a most essential way of humanity’s redemptive capacity for understanding and wonder.

William's book list on journeys of inner and outer discovery

William deBuys Why did William love this book?

I don’t know which of the journeys in this slim volume I cherish more: the outer, which entails an arduous trek through a remote corner of the Himalaya, or the inner which involves the author’s fraught quest for a deeply Buddhist kind of inner peace.

I have carried this book on similarly long walks in the wilds of Laos and Nepal—even on the very trails that Matthiessen trod. It is one of the great companions of my life.

By Peter Matthiessen,

Why should I read it?

7 authors picked The Snow Leopard as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'A beautiful book, and worthy of the mountains he is among' Paul Theroux

'A delight' i Paper

This is the account of a journey to the dazzling Tibetan plateau of Dolpo in the high Himalayas. In 1973 Matthiessen made the 250-mile trek to Dolpo, as part of an expedition to study wild blue sheep. It was an arduous, sometimes dangerous, physical endeavour: exertion, blisters, blizzards, endless negotiations with sherpas, quaking cold. But it was also a 'journey of the heart' - amongst the beauty and indifference of the mountains Matthiessen was searching for solace. He was also searching for a…


Book cover of More Than Birds: Adventurous Lives of North American Naturalists

Michael Layland Author Of In Nature's Realm: Early Naturalists Explore Vancouver Island

From my list on the history of natural history.

Why am I passionate about this?

In Nature’s Realm is my third book on the theme of exploration of Vancouver Island, my home for the past thirty years, and my first focussed on the history of natural history. In it, I call upon decades of experience in mapping hitherto scarcely known parts of the world, combined with a keen fascination with the fauna and flora of the many places where I have lived and worked. I have marvelled at the work of the exploring naturalists and am fascinated with their personal histories. I find it enthralling how they each added to the sum of human knowledge of the wonders of the natural world, now so sadly threatened.

Michael's book list on the history of natural history

Michael Layland Why did Michael love this book?

Here is an excellent introduction to the “birders,” those amateurs, professional collectors, scientists, and artists—men and women—who have investigated ornithology in North America. The author, a Canadian, covers 22 fellow enthusiasts from Wilson and Audubon through Peterson, Bateman, and Sibley. She relates how each of her subjects studied and built upon the work of their predecessors to construct what we know today. 

Her book is well-constructed, easy to follow, and delightful to read. There are a few monochrome illustrations, portraits, and maps. I discovered this fine book during my research for my most recent book, and much admired the writing style and structural plan.

By Val Shushkewich,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked More Than Birds as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Once people encounter the natural world and become aware of its intricacy, fragility, beauty, and significance, they will recognize the need for conservation.

The fascinating development of natural history studies in North America is portrayed through the life stories of 22 naturalists. The 19th century saw early North American naturalists such as Alexander Wilson, the "Father of American Ornithology," John James Audubon, and Thomas Nuttall describing and illustrating the spectacular flora and fauna they found in the New World.

Scientists of the Smithsonian Institution and the Canadian Museum of Nature worked feverishly to describe and catalogue the species that exist…


Book cover of Flower Hunters

Michael Layland Author Of In Nature's Realm: Early Naturalists Explore Vancouver Island

From my list on the history of natural history.

Why am I passionate about this?

In Nature’s Realm is my third book on the theme of exploration of Vancouver Island, my home for the past thirty years, and my first focussed on the history of natural history. In it, I call upon decades of experience in mapping hitherto scarcely known parts of the world, combined with a keen fascination with the fauna and flora of the many places where I have lived and worked. I have marvelled at the work of the exploring naturalists and am fascinated with their personal histories. I find it enthralling how they each added to the sum of human knowledge of the wonders of the natural world, now so sadly threatened.

Michael's book list on the history of natural history

Michael Layland Why did Michael love this book?

This fine book was another discovery of mine as I studied the literature on aspects of the history of natural history for my own book in this genre. Although written by two academics, this book is easy to read by a generally educated public. It covers what is to me, the engrossing topic of the early botanical collectors and illustrators, both men and women. The authors recount the lives of eleven subjects from Linnaeus through Banks, Douglas, Spruce, and Hooker, and how they, together, founded the science of botany by roaming the world in search of new species. There are 32 well-chosen illustrations, in colour and monochrome.

By Mary Gribbin, John Gribbin,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Flower Hunters as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The flower hunters were intrepid explorers - remarkable, eccentric men and women who scoured the world in search of extraordinary plants from the middle of the seventeenth to the end of the nineteenth century, and helped establish the new science of botany. For these adventurers, the search for new, undiscovered plant specimens was something worth risking - and often losing - their lives for. From the Douglas-fir and the monkey puzzle tree, to exotic orchids and azaleas, many of the plants that are now so familiar to us were found in distant regions of the globe, often in wild and…


5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in Italy, social history, and the Renaissance?

Italy 406 books
Social History 49 books
The Renaissance 97 books