A 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 convergence of land contraction, soil depletion, climate change, pollution, and plague subsumed 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.
Eleanor 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.
Introduction / Thinking and Talking EcosystemicallyChapter One / The Five Disasters Facing Medieval EcosystemsChapter Two / The Laws of Waste: The Bible and the Common LawChapter Three / Waste in Sermons and Penitential Manuals: The Unjust StewardChapter Four / Winner and Waster: The Imperilment of the LandChapter Five / Wasters and Workers in Piers Plowman: Famine and Food InsecurityChapter Six / Chaucer’s Yeoman’s Wasting Body: Pollution and ContagionChapter Seven / The Wasted Lands of the Green Knight, and the Wasting of Camelot: Climate Change, Climate RevengeChapter Eight / Gardens, Bees, and Wastours: Political Waste and the Fantasy of SustainabilityChapter Nine / Aftermath: From Wasting to Waste MatterEpilogueAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex
"A moving and powerful study of neglect and ecological damage as reflected in the literature of the Middle Ages."
