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Narrating Nature: Framing Ecologies in the Middle Ages

When: —
Venue: Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square

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The 2020 Birkbeck Medieval Seminar examines the stories of nature, landscape, and environment as they were told in the middle ages.

Drawing on interdisciplinary discussions across history, literature, and archaeology, we explore how ecologies were not only encountered and perceived, but also constructed, imagined, and evoked.

Participants in this seminar are invited to interrogate a range of topics, including: how people in the middle ages (broadly conceived) used narratives to define and frame interactions between humans and non-humans within the multi-species systems we now describe as ‘ecologies’; how topographies of culture and nature, of human work and natural agency, were negotiated in practice; and how culturally-determined approaches to texts and materials were used to structure approaches to, and understandings of, medieval environments. Rather than viewing the middle ages as a source of primitivist, harmonious ways of living with a now-estranged nature, this seminar playfully posits that ecological constructs such as ‘wild nature’ are medieval dreams from which we ‘moderns’ have not yet awoken. By focusing on narrative, we will explore how the making of places in landscape and the telling of places in text can occupy and operationalize the ‘same’ ecologies. Ultimately, the seminar seeks to explore the ways that narratives of nature constructed in the middle ages continue to shape how we think and feel about ecologies. 

This event is organised by the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology and the Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing, Birkbeck.

It is part of Birkbeck's Discover the Past series. To see the full list of events, visit the Discover the Past web page. 

Photographs may be taken at this event for future use in printed and online publicity, and social media.

 

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