ABSTRACT
IF THIS BOOK WERE ORGANISED THEMATICALLY RATHER THAN chronologically, the following essay on the changing cultural accommodations to the Bartholomaeus/Trevisa Properties of Things from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance would obviously belong much earlier in the volume, with the other studies of the content and textuality of Properties. A chronology based solely on an originary moment of composition might also argue for an earlier appearance, for an initial version of the essay was written for the 1980 CUNY English Forum, and intended for publication in the second volume of the AMS annual of that name. But the volume never came out; indeed, the CUNY English Forum is a bibliographical curiosity in that it must be one of the very few serials with only a single volume in print. My essay lay dormant as my textual and critical concerns shifted away from editing to theory to cultural studies, and was reanimated only when Deborah Sinnreich-Levy and Gale Sigal asked me to contribute to a memorial volume for Helaine Newstead. Since Helaine had directed the dissertation from which both my study of nature in Bartholomaeus and this essay on cultural accommodation had emerged, it seemed only fitting that my contribution to the Newstead memorial be a revised version of the English Forum address.
