Goodbye, Saffron

In A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, Barbara Tuchman wrote that the “people of the Middle Ages existed under mental, moral and physical circumstances so different from our own as to constitute almost a foreign civilization.” Thus, Tuchman went on, the similarities between us and them reveal qualities “permanent in human nature.” From this perspective, a new book by scholar and First Things contributor Bonnie Lander Johnson, Vanishing Landscapes: The Story of Plants and How We Lost Them, offers the intriguing promise of a way back to a life closer to nature. If we know how they did it, maybe we can do it, too.