IMC 2025: Sessions

This panel considers representations and uses of the natural world in a range of literary works and other texts, which drew upon landscapes, environments, and their other-than-human inhabitants as sources of knowledge and as reflections of the human life in-the-world. Winstanley-Channer considers the ‘Legendary Poems’ of the fourteenth-century Book of Taliesin, arguing that Welsh court poets treated expertise in natural philosophy as a hallmark of their profession. Winstanley-Channer shows how these poems explore natural phenomena through questioning and paradox, emphasising diversity over uniformity and interrelationships and processes over ontologically distinct entities. Parrent explores plant and animal agency in the creation of practical knowledge in the mid-twelfth to mid-fourteenth centuries, considering how theological commentators (Alexander Neckam), medical writers (Bartholomaeus of Salerno), and chroniclers (Matthew Paris and Jean de Joinville), employed animals as repositories of knowledge about the natural world, and as guides to mimicking Man’s prelapsarian state and navigating the postlapsarian world. Paz, though an ecocritical reading of Old English elegies and riddles, presents a framework for an ‘ecocreative’ way of rewriting and reimagining Old English verse, responding to the shaping of self and the natural world in this poetry, and developing an ongoing dialogue between medieval texts and modern translation practice.