Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction : Doing what comes naturally / Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal -- Measuring authority, authoritative measures : Hesiod's Works and days / Laura M. Slatkin -- Nature in person : medieval and Renaissance allegories and emblems / Katharine Park -- Burning The fable of the bees : the incendiary authority of nature / Danielle Allen -- Attention and the values of nature in the Enlightenment / Lorraine Daston -- The erotic authority of nature : science, art, and the female during Goethe's Italian journey / Robert J. Richards -- Nature and Bildung : pedagogical naturalism in nineteenth-century Germany / Eckhardt Fuchs -- Economics, ecology, and the value of nature / Matt Price -- Trouble in the earthly paradise : the regime of nature in late medieval Christian culture / Joan Cadden -- Nature on trial : acts "against nature" in the law courts of early modern Germany and Switzerland / Helmut Puff -- Onanism, Enlightenment medicine, and the immanent justice of nature / Fernando Vidal -- Ants and the nature of nature in Auguste Forel, Erich Wasmann, and William Morton Wheeler / A.J. Lustig -- "To become as one dead" : nature and the political subject in modern Japan / Julia Adeney Thomas -- Liberation through control in the body politics of U.S. radical feminism / Michelle Murphy -- Complexio/complexion : categorizing individual natures, 1250-1600 / Valentin Groebner -- Human experimentation in the eighteenth century : natural boundaries and valid testing / Londa Schiebinger -- Nature and nation in Chinese political thought : the national essence circle in early-twentieth-century China / Fa-ti Fan -- When pollen became poison : a cultural geography of ragweed in America / Gregg Mitman -- Three roots of human recency : molecular anthropology, the refigured Acheulean, and the UNESCO response to Aushcwitz / Robert N. Proctor.