Apocalyptic Ecologies: From Creation to Doom in Middle English Literature [Paperback]

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. InApocalyptic Ecologies, Shannon Gayk traces representations of environmental calamities through medieval plays, sermons, and poetry such asCleannessandPiers 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.Shannon Gaykis professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author ofImage, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth Century England.Introduction: Learning to Die
Excursus: A Brief History of Medieval Climate Change

Part I. Edenic Ecologies
1. Being Earth: Performing the “Fayre Processe” of Creation
2. “This Deadly Life”: Elegy and Ecological Care after Eden

Part II. Everyday Apocalypse
Excursus: On Plague, Precedent, and the Punishment Paradigm
3. Becoming Beholden: Floods, Fires, and Acts of Attention
4. Ordinary Apocalypses: Wondrous Weather in Early England

Part III. Apocalyptic Ecologies
5. Fifteen Ways of Looking: Signs at the End of the World
Epilogue: Learning to Love: Ecological Attention and the Work of Care

Acknowledgments
Notes
Abbreviations
Bibliography
Index

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