Waste and the Wasters
Poetry and Ecosystemic Thought in Medieval England
9780226830179
9780226830162
9780226830186
Waste and the Wasters
Poetry and Ecosystemic Thought in Medieval England
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 convergent crisis of land contraction, soil depletion, climate change, pollution, and plague eclipsed Western Europe. In a cultural 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.
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 convergent crisis of land contraction, soil depletion, climate change, pollution, and plague eclipsed Western Europe. In a cultural 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.