Apocalyptic Ecologies: From Creation to Doom in Middle English Literature - Hardcover

Gayk, Professor Shannon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226837602 ISBN 13: 9780226837604

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2024

Synopsis

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 this title

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226837602
• ISBN 13: 9780226837604
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304