Skip to main content

IMC 2021: Sessions

Session 312: Environments and Eco-Critical Approaches in Earlier Medieval English Literature

Monday 5 July 2021, 16.30-18.00

Moderator/Chair:Jennifer Neville, Department of English, Royal Holloway, University of London
Paper 312-aThe Great Storm Presented in Aldhelm's Carmen rhythmicum: An Insight into the Environmental Damage Effected and Its Hitherto Unacknowledged Role in the Making of a Formative Period in Later 7th-Century West Saxon History
(Language: English)
Katherine Barker, Bournemouth University
Index terms: Ecclesiastical History, Geography and Settlement Studies, Language and Literature - Latin, Literacy and Orality
Paper 312-bThe Sea as a Hyperobject in the Old English Exodus: An Ecocritical Perspective on Heroism and Masculinity
(Language: English)
Jacek Olesiejko, Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań
Index terms: Gender Studies, Language and Literature - Old English
Paper 312-cWhat 'Kynde' of Nature: Indigenous Ecocriticism Addresses Gawain's Green Wilderness and Piers's Fair Field
(Language: English)
Wallace Cleaves, Department of English University of California Riverside / Tongva Tribal Nation Claremont
Index terms: Daily Life, Economics - Rural, Geography and Settlement Studies, Language and Literature - Middle English
Abstract

Paper -a:
Aldhelm of Malmesbury, first Bishop of Sherborne, composed a 200-line Latin poetic, bardic-style work which takes as its focus a dramatic storm. His survival he conveys as Divine blessing following the creation of a Roman-style Wessex-Dumnonian (Devon) border in the making of a coastal trading estate confirmed by charter in AD 774. Aldhelm's vivid description of the damage effected presents a powerful element of 'meteorological corroboration' here in its historico-geographical setting; to flooding, coastal erosion, loss of saltpans, destruction of trees and buildings, and, by implication, to its longer-term environmental role in 'setting the scene' for early West Saxon history.

Paper -b:
As Timothy Morton claims, a hyperobject can only be conceived of in terms of traces, being too complex to be comprehended as a whole. The sea in the Old English Exodus is a hyperobject, represented experientially in relation to man-made objects and man-made spaces. The parting walls of water are represented metaphorically as a hall and a sword. Its traces are thus gendered and serve the purpose, the present paper argues, of naturalising a culturally constructed hierarchy of male/female/the environment. The representation of the sea in flux, however, dismantles the hierarchy and engenders a deconstructive hermeneutic.

Paper -c:
This paper seeks to understand the relationship between people and nature as displayed through several of the most critical texts of the 14th century, particularly Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Piers Plowman. Both texts depict interrelation between the world of nature and the human sphere, but the connection is intensely mediated and attenuated. Using scholarship from the growing field of Indigenous ecocriticism, this paper seeks to understand and compare how the relationship between people and nature is reconstructed at points of significant rupture and social transformation, then and now.