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IMC 2021: Sessions

Session 2303: Representing the Natural World

Friday 9 July 2021, 16.30-18.00

Moderator/Chair:Cathy Hume, Department of English, University of Bristol
Paper 2303-aCaterpillars in the Garden: Divine Agricultural Intervention in Gregory I's Dialogues
(Language: English)
Alyssa Van Haitsma Kotva, Department of History, Ohio State University
Index terms: Economics - Rural, Hagiography, Mentalities, Science
Paper 2303-b'Le printemps perpétuel': Art, Nature, and the Impossible Garden in Medieval French Literature, Visual, and Material Culture
(Language: English)
Charlotte Spencer, School of Modern Languages & Cultures, Durham University
Index terms: Art History - Painting, Art History - Sculpture, Language and Literature - French or Occitan, Manuscripts and Palaeography
Paper 2303-cFrom natura to Nature: The Pastoral Mode and Rising Humanism in Medieval Poetic Debates
(Language: English)
Kathleen Burt, Department of English, Middle Georgia State University
Index terms: Language and Literature - Middle English, Language and Literature - Latin
Abstract

Paper -a:
Scholars frequently draw upon Pope Gregory I's Dialogues to illustrate the impoverished, embattled, and pious state of a society transitioning between Antiquity and the Middle Ages, as it vividly foretells and recounts the destruction of Italy through both political instability and natural disasters in the later 6th century. I will complicate this analysis through a reading of the Dialogues' agricultural miracles, which contain often mundane features of rural life. This paper suggests that, when viewed in both their literary and environmental context, the agricultural miracles in the Dialogues provide rich insight into early medieval beliefs about divine action in the natural world, and the ways that agricultural knowledge and experience might shape these beliefs.

Paper -b:
The enclosed garden, as it appears in medieval art and (ekphrastically) in several works such as Floire et Blancheflor (c.1160) and Guillaume de Lorris' Le Roman de la Rose (c.1230), tends to be a purely imaginary place or 'non-place'. As a discrete locus or assemblage of art-and-nature-melding constructions, it is divorced from reality, and in some cases unaffected by the passing of seasons and time, meaning that it can be uprooted, transferred, replanted, and refigured to suit the needs of poets and artists alike, serving as a site through which both could explore the boundaries of their own art forms.

Paper -c:
There is a trend in medieval debate poetry illustrating a shift from emphasizing the natural world to human nature between the 12th and 16th centuries. Using the pastoral mode to consider this shift reveals that, over time, debate poems show humanity achieving greater mastery over their intellectual and physical worlds. The poems move from naturally based concerns and images in Latin debates to Middle English debates focused on the human world. The natural imagery and the concerns are the focus of the Latin tradition. In the later English poems, the settings and characters become more human-centric, as do themes and reasoning.