Description: A groundbreaking examination of ecological thought in medieval England.
While the scale of today's crisis is unprecedented, environmental catastrophe is nothing new. Waste and the Wasters studies the late Middle Ages, when a convergence of land contraction, soil depletion, climate change, pollution, and plague subsumed Western Europe. In a culture lacking formal scientific methods, the task of explaining and coming to grips with what was happening fell to medieval poets. The poems they wrote used the terms "waste" or "wasters" to anchor trenchant critiques of people's unsustainable relationships with the world around them and with each other. In this book, Eleanor Johnson shows how poetry helped medieval people understand and navigate the ecosystemic crises--both material and spiritual--of their time.Brief description: Eleanor Johnson is associate professor of English and comparative literature and director of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University. She is the author of several books, most recently, Waste and the Wasters: Poetry and Ecosystemic Thought in Medieval England, published by the University of Chicago Press.
Review Quotes:
"In a richly sourced and engaging volume, Johnson makes a strong case, not just for the presence of ecosystemic concepts shaping much medieval English poetry, but also for the value to contemporary ecocritics of exploring past societies' grappling with recognizable, if differently articulated, ecological crises."
-- "English Historical Review"