Attitudes toward Mountains - Mountain Geography: Physical and Human Dimensions - page 463

climbed Mont Ventoux in Provence simply “for the sake of seeing the remarkable alti-
tude of the place” (Gribble 1899: 18-19). Petrarch's climb is often cited as the first
evidence of Renaissance appreciation of natural beauty, but much of his account has so
allegorical a cast that some scholars have suspected he never made the climb (Noyce
1950). Much more clear-cut evidence of a new interest in natural beauty and natural
phenomena is Leonardo da Vinci's observations of mountains, both in his art and in his
scientific notebooks, at the end of the fifteenth century (Schama 1995).
The person usually credited as being the first European to appreciate and love moun-
tains for their own sake is the sixteenth-century Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner. In a
letter to a friend in 1541, Gesner wrote:
I am resolved henceforth, most learned Avienus, that as long as it may please
God to grant me life, I will ascend several mountains, or at least one, every year,
at the season when the flowers are in their glory, partly for the sake of examin-
ing them, and partly for the sake of good bodily exercise and of mental delight.
For how great a pleasure, think you, is it, how great delight for a man touched
as he ought to be, to wonder at the mass of the mountains as one gazes on their
vastness, and to lift up one's head as it were amongst the clouds? The under-
standing is deeply moved, I know not wherefore, by their amazing height, and is
driven to think of the Great Architect who made them, (COOLIDGE 1889: 12-13)
He not only carried out this resolve, but took other Renaissance naturalists along on
his Alpine excursions, awakening their interest in mountain plants and opening their
eyes to the glories of the mountains. His student and successor at the University of
Zurich, Josias Simler, published a learned treatise in 1574 on snow and ice travel; in
it, he discussed such things as crampons, alpine sticks, use of eye shades, and how to
cross crevasses (Gribble 1899).
The hold of theology on science and philosophy was very strong throughout the
Middle Ages, and the general antipathy felt toward mountains was reinforced by reli-
gious sanctions and ideas. When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman
Empire in the first half of the first millennium, its leaders reduced the divinities of the
natural landscape to demons antagonistic to the new religion. Christian missionaries
deliberately cut down sacred groves where pagan rituals traditionally took place, as a
means of putting such practices to an end. Inspired by the writings of early theologi-
ans such as St. Augustine, they tended to view the wilderness—and the mountains that
formed a particularly wild and uncontrollable part of it—as the corrupt domain of the
evil powers of nature that the Church had to suppress in order to establish the kingdom
of heaven on earth (Bernbaum 1997).
An influential post-medieval spokesman for this idea was Thomas Burnet, who asser-
ted in The Sacred Theory of the Earth (1684) that the Earth was originally a perfectly
smooth sphere, the “Mundane Egg”; as punishment for man's sins, the surface was rup-
tured and the interior fluids boiled out as “vast and undigested heaps of stones and
earth.”
By the end of the seventeenth century, on the verge of the Enlightenment, public-
ations began to appear supporting the idea of a purposefully designed Earth and the