Waste and the Wasters: Poetry and Ecosystemic Thought in Medieval England
by Eleanor Johnson
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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 show more 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. show lessMembers
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Author Information
4 Works 97 Members
Eleanor Johnson is associate professor or English and comparative literature at Columbia University and the author of Practicing Literary Theory in the Late Middle Ages, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Awards and Honors
Awards
Common Knowledge
- Original title
- Waste and the Wasters: Poetry and Ecosystemic Thought in Medieval England
- Original publication date
- 2023
- Original language
- English
Classifications
- Genres
- Literature Studies and Criticism, Fiction and Literature
- DDC/MDS
- 820.9001 — Literature & rhetoric English & Old English literatures English and Old English (Anglo-Saxon) literatures History, description, critical appraisal of works in more than one form
- LCC
- PR275 .E59 .J66 — Language and Literature English English Literature By period Medieval. Middle English (1066-1500)
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 2
- Popularity
- 6,014,296
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 3
