Waste and the Wasters: Poetry and Ecosystemic Thought in Medieval England
by Eleanor Johnson
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.
About the Author
Eleanor Johnson is an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and specializes in late medieval English prose, poetry, and drama; medieval poetics and literary philosophy; law and literature in the Middle Ages; and vernacular theology. Her first book, Practicing Literary Theory in the Late Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve, was published in 2013 (University of Chicago Press). Her second book, Dramatizing Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama, was published in 2018 (University of Chicago Press). Her recent articles include "Feeling Time, Will, and Words: Vernacular Devotion in The Cloud of Unknowing (Journal for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2011), "The Poetics of Waste" (PMLA, 2012), "Objects of the Law: the Cases of Dorigen and Virginia" (2015), an essay on Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale (JEGP, 2015), "Horrific Visions of the Host: (Exemplaria, 2015), and "Tragic Nihilism in the Canterbury Tales" (JMEMS 2018). Two collections of her poetry, The Dwell (Scrambler Books) and Her Many Feathered Bones (Achiote Press), were published in 2009 and 2010. She is also the Poetry Section editor at Public Books.
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