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OverviewA 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 convergent crisis of land contraction, soil depletion, climate change, pollution, and plague eclipsed 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 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. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Eleanor JohnsonPublisher: The University of Chicago Press Imprint: University of Chicago Press Dimensions: Width: 14.00cm , Height: 2.00cm , Length: 21.60cm Weight: 0.340kg ISBN: 9780226830162ISBN 10: 0226830160 Pages: 224 Publication Date: 29 November 2023 Audience: Professional and scholarly , Professional & Vocational Format: Hardback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: Out of stock  The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available. Table of ContentsIntroduction / Thinking and Talking Ecosystemically Chapter One / The Five Disasters Facing Medieval Ecosystems Chapter Two / The Laws of Waste: The Bible and the Common Law Chapter Three / Waste in Sermons and Penitential Manuals: The Unjust Steward Chapter Four / Winner and Waster: The Imperilment of the Land Chapter Five / Wasters and Workers in Piers Plowman: Famine and Food Insecurity Chapter Six / Chaucer’s Yeoman’s Wasting Body: Pollution and Contagion Chapter Seven / The Wasted Lands of the Green Knight, and the Wasting of Camelot: Climate Change, Climate Revenge Chapter Eight / Gardens, Bees, and Wastours: Political Waste and the Fantasy of Sustainability Chapter Nine / Aftermath: From Wasting to Waste Matter Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes IndexReviews"“Waste and the Wasters deftly maps the contours of ecosystemic imagination in medieval England through close engagement with one of its major vehicles: poetry. Johnson’s compelling study shows the importance of dealing with premodern sources in all their complexity as they work to make sense of the dense relational landscape that they inhabit and their responsibilities within it."" -- Brooke Holmes, Princeton University “Literary scholars in the Anthropocene can’t help but notice precarity, both precarity of time (there may not be much left!) and discursive precarity (does our discipline have much to offer?). Enter Eleanor Johnson. When we finish reading this vigorously conversational book, the ecosystem of our discipline will find refreshing new networks within which to work.” -- James Simpson, Harvard University “A beautiful and urgent essay on ecosystemic thought in late medieval England that is also a call to action on the climate catastrophe now unfolding. Look to art, says Johnson, when there’s no organized vocabulary for expressions of ecosystemic peril. Look to medieval poetry to find complex and ethical ruminations on what it is to waste and to be a waster, both critical communal problems tying individuals to larger concepts of social justice. In our current eco-meltdown, this book will emphatically not waste anyone’s time.” -- Carolyn Dinshaw, New York University" Author InformationEleanor Johnson is associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. She is the author of several books including, Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama, also published by the University of Chicago Press. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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