Ecological Philology: Mind, Environment, and the Medieval Manuscript

2022

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher. It is difficult to pin down exactly whom to acknowledge for their help in writing this book since so many diverse conversations led to its existence, but we would like to start by thanking Louisa Mackenzie for setting out, in a single question at the MLA convention, the general line of thought explored in this book. We offer hearty thanks to our contributors for being part of this laboratory of early modern French écologies-it is our hope that it will continue to foster productive entanglements between the many nonhuman keywords and quite human persons that interact throughout. We are delighted that this volume appears in the AUP series Environmental Humanities in Pre-modern Cultures, and we thank the series editors (especially Steve Mentz) for their warm welcome. We thank Erika Gaffney for her care and professionalism in ushering this project from its early stages to this final product. Melanie Hackney and Aileen Christensen provided editing and formatting, for which we are grateful. We thank Goldschmied & Chiari (Sara and Eleonora) for granting us the permission to use their beautiful work Nympheas for our cover art, and we thank Diane Brown for suggesting that their art may resonate with our project. Pauline Goul would like to thank Karen Pinkus for introducing her to (for lack of a better word) ecocriticism, Kathleen Long for her constant support, and Phillip John Usher for taking on this collaborative effort and generally being an ideal early modern écological companion, in more ways than one. Pablo García-Piñar should always be acknowledged, although listing why would require another book. Phillip John Usher expresses his gratitude to Pauline Goul for her immediate excitement about this project and her dedication to seeing it into print. He dedicates his part of the volume to Chloé Juniper Usher, who joined this world as the book came together, giving it a whole new urgency and depth. 1 The vanishing point of Mackenzie's MLA talk-and, arguably, of the present volume-is her article, 'It's a Queer Thing: Early Modern French Ecocriticism', which makes a resounding and articulate call for putting early modern French literature into dialogue with questions of ecology.

Environmental History, 2013

is fascinated by plagues as disasters, as evidenced by his series of books with titles like From the Brink of the Apocalypse (2001), The Black Death (2005), and Plagues in World History (2011).(1) His latest book An Environmental History of the Middle Ages is likewise centered on the Black Death of 1348-1350 as a turning point. Aberth bases his book on the contention that 'the unprecedented ecological crises of the late Middle Ages forced a radical rethinking of environmental attitudes, one that anticipates the "new ecology" of today' (p. 8). As this statement indicates, Aberth wanted to write an intellectual history of 'what medieval people thought about their natural surroundings, rather than what they did to them' (author's emphasis, p. 10). He argues that the Middle Ages went through four phases in attitude toward nature: eschatological in the late Antique period, adversarial in the early Middle Ages, collaborative in the high Middle Ages, and a more sophisticated nuanced view of the environment that combined the adversarial with the collaborative after the Black Death. Keeping Aberth's own aims in mind, I will evaluate how well the book succeeds as an environmental history of the Middle Ages.

2023

Die folgende Auswahlbibliographie erfasst Publikationen ab dem Jahr 1995, die sich auf Fragen und Aspekte des Ecocriticism beziehen und dabei einen Schwerpunkt speziell auf Themen und Texte des Mittelalters legen. Das vorliegende Verzeichnis ist das Ergebnis einer im Sommersemester 2020 am Lehrstuhl für deutsche Philologie der Universität Würzburg durchgeführten Forschungsübung. Es versteht sich als ein Hilfsmittel zur Orientierung im Kontext mediävistischer Forschung und erhebt keinen Anspruch auf Vollständigkeit. [The following selective bibliography covers publications from 1995 onwards that relate to issues and aspects of Ecocriticism, with a specific focus on medieval topics and texts. It is the result of a research exercise conducted iat the Department of German Philology at the University of Würzburg (summer term 2020). It is intended as an aid to orientation in the context of medievalist research and doesn’t make a claim to completeness.]

postmedieval, 2022

Artifacts from the Middle Ages were fabricated from raw materials harvested from underneath or above the ground, from flora and fauna, rivers and oceans; sometimes they were shaped into the form of plants or animals, or they were made to evoke other natural materials. The ecological dimensions of medieval objects were thus complex and manifold and call for new scholarly analysis as the humanities become more and more strongly concerned with the environment. This essay cluster seeks to address the entanglements, super-impositions, and fields of tension between nature, matter, and material culture in the Middle Ages from a transdisciplinary perspective, providing a platform for experts of literary studies, art historians, and archaeologists to engage critically with ecologies of things and texts. These inspiring and ground-breaking essays traverse the globe to uncover the ecological entanglements of humans with stone and water, crystal and wind, trees and animal skins.

A r c h a e o l o g i c a l R e v i e w f r o m C a m b r i d g e 2 4 . 2 : 1 4 1 -1 5 5

2025

The Laboratory of Medieval Studies - LEME/UNIFESP - Art History Center of the School of Philosophy, Languages, and Human Sciences/EFLCH at the Federal University of São Paulo/UNIFESP and Art Institute of the University of Brasília/UNB organize the III Medieval Art Research Meeting: Cosmovisions: Medieval Heritage and the Contemporary Ecocritical Debate, on April 29th and 30th, 2025, in person at the Cassiano Nunes Auditorium, 1st basement – BCE, at the University of Brasília. Presentation “There’s so much we can still learn from the ancients about nature,” argues Serenella Iovino (In: Schliephake: 2017, p. 315). The objective of the III Medieval Art Research Meeting: Cosmovisions: Medieval Heritage and the Contemporary Ecocritical Debate is to contribute to contemporary environmental discussions from the perspective of medieval studies. We are, indeed, living through a clear ecological crisis, an Anthropocene characterized by the strong negative impact of humans on the cosmos and the earth in particular. In an article titled “Revealing Roots,” Iovino proposes that it would be crucial to incorporate “ancient cultures into the contemporary debate on environmental humanities” (op. cit.). Following the Italian researcher’s judgment, we believe that the ecological visions contained in medieval texts and images can be brought to the fore and interact with contemporary environmental concerns. Indeed, this reading allows us to uncover the “historical ecologies” that the Middle Ages, with all its richness, contains. This would also be an anachronistic reading that examines the modernity of the medieval era. Our goal is to reveal the ecological visions expressed in medieval images and texts and illustrate the discursive constructions of the relationships and boundaries between humans, non-humans, and nature that both images and texts propose and incorporate. What are the images and thoughts that shaped the “ecological visions” of medieval artists? From this anthropocentric or ecocentric perspective that informs the general views of nature in the Middle Ages, papers will be accepted on the following themes: 1. Nature as an environmental dimension in its strategies of representation. 2. Medieval cultural and intertextual forms that bring new ideas about Nature, especially in their contemporary and ecocritical approach. 3. The relationships of humans with “others than humans” (animals and plants); 4. What specific "Weltanschauung" during the Middle Ages, in the form of texts and images, helps to clarify the poetic decline of ecological visions. 5. The connection between culture and the physical world in the medieval scope. 6. The study of natural phenomena and the privileged place for “otium”. 7. Animals, plants, monsters, natural harmony, and environmental adversities in texts and images as a metaphor for life. Communication languages: Portuguese, Spanish, and English.

Biodiverse Nr 2 2016

goo.gl/pxxlYc Revealing Environmental Memory: What the study of medieval literature can tell us about long-term environmental change