Description
A meditative reflection on what medieval disaster writing can teach us about how to respond to the climate emergency.
When a series of ecological disasters swept medieval England, writers turned to religious storytelling for precedents. Their depictions of biblical floods, fires, storms, droughts, and plagues reveal an unsettled relationship to the natural world, at once unchanging and bafflingly unpredictable. In Apocalyptic Ecologies, Shannon Gayk traces representations of environmental calamities through medieval plays, sermons, and poetry such as Cleanness and Piers Plowman. In premodern disaster writing, she recovers a vision of environmental flourishing that could inspire new forms of ecological care today: a truly apocalyptic sensibility capable of seeing in every ending, every emergency a new beginning waiting to emerge.
About the Author
Shannon Gayk is professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth Century England.
Reviews
"At once intimate and historically far-ranging, Apocalyptic Ecologies is a lyrical meditation on how societies grapple with the effects of natural disaster. Beautifully written, it makes the compelling case that medieval writers offer us not just a pageant of weather disasters drawn from the Old and New Testaments but instead provide modern readers with urgently needed models of ecological connection and environmental stewardship."
-- Kellie Robertson, University of Maryland
"Apocalyptic Ecologies will be a transformative book in premodern studies and across the environmental humanities. With eloquence and great erudition, Gayk traces the apocalyptic edges of medieval ecological imaginings, revealing vital new perspectives on a world that thought about its own end times in ways that haunt us still. A moving and powerful book." -- Bruce Holsinger, University of Virginia
"Apocalyptic Ecologies offers an illuminating account of environmental thinking in premodern vernacular literature. Through beautiful readings of medieval plays and poetry, punctuated with moving reflections on her own experiences of flux in the twenty-first century, Gayk opens up medieval literature as a source of both comfort and challenge to contemporary readers living through what often seem to be the end days." -- Jessica Brantley, Yale University
Book Information
ISBN 9780226837611
Author Professor Shannon Gayk
Format Paperback
Page Count 304
Imprint University of Chicago Press
Publisher The University of Chicago Press
Weight(grams) 454g
When a series of ecological disasters swept medieval England, writers turned to religious storytelling for precedents. Their depictions of biblical floods, fires, storms, droughts, and plagues reveal an unsettled relationship to the natural world, at once unchanging and bafflingly unpredictable. In Apocalyptic Ecologies, Shannon Gayk traces representations of environmental calamities through medieval plays, sermons, and poetry such as Cleanness and Piers Plowman. In premodern disaster writing, she recovers a vision of environmental flourishing that could inspire new forms of ecological care today: a truly apocalyptic sensibility capable of seeing in every ending, every emergency a new beginning waiting to emerge.
About the Author
Shannon Gayk is professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth Century England.
Reviews
"At once intimate and historically far-ranging, Apocalyptic Ecologies is a lyrical meditation on how societies grapple with the effects of natural disaster. Beautifully written, it makes the compelling case that medieval writers offer us not just a pageant of weather disasters drawn from the Old and New Testaments but instead provide modern readers with urgently needed models of ecological connection and environmental stewardship."
-- Kellie Robertson, University of Maryland
"Apocalyptic Ecologies will be a transformative book in premodern studies and across the environmental humanities. With eloquence and great erudition, Gayk traces the apocalyptic edges of medieval ecological imaginings, revealing vital new perspectives on a world that thought about its own end times in ways that haunt us still. A moving and powerful book." -- Bruce Holsinger, University of Virginia
"Apocalyptic Ecologies offers an illuminating account of environmental thinking in premodern vernacular literature. Through beautiful readings of medieval plays and poetry, punctuated with moving reflections on her own experiences of flux in the twenty-first century, Gayk opens up medieval literature as a source of both comfort and challenge to contemporary readers living through what often seem to be the end days." -- Jessica Brantley, Yale University
Book Information
ISBN 9780226837611
Author Professor Shannon Gayk
Format Paperback
Page Count 304
Imprint University of Chicago Press
Publisher The University of Chicago Press
Weight(grams) 454g
