Nature (Kynde) in Middle English Literature

Brief survey of views of nature in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century ME literature. Drawing on a lexical range of kynde encompassing “natural and Christian love,” PPl presents “naturalness” as “a prime moral desideratum”; L less emphatically than other ME writers declares nature’s subordination to God or Reason, even though he shows that the natural in a sexual context can urge toward sin.