Ecologizing Late Ancient and Byzantine Worlds

(Hardback)

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This volume explores late ancient and Byzantine media from an ecological view point and with a special focus on non-human agencies. How are such agencies entangled in the human elements whether in the human media itself or the human characters of literary texts How were these media once weathered by concrete ancient elements, and how can we re-expose them to the weather of ecological readings To what degree do these media imply the agency of landscapes, plants, animals, and other natural phenomena To what degree do they comprise literary exploitations of other species

By applying an interdisciplinary approach that merges the fields of literature, history, and religious studies in the service of ecocriticism, the chapters highlight diverse ways in which premodern writers engaged with the non-human world. The integration of ecological perspectives into late ancient and Byzantine studies is a remarkably recent development. This book pioneers the interweaving of late ancient and Byzantine studies with ecocriticism. From the ancient treatises on dreams to monastic tales, from the Hexameron literature to the Byzantine romance, from the Exeter Book to a mysterious Byzantine icon, the book investigates a diverse range of media to uncover the intricacies of relationships in the natural world. It illustrates how these media are not only repositories of cultural and intellectual history but also valuable chests of ecological awareness, by overcoming the binary antinomy of culture and nature, human and non-human.

Reviews

More than just a study of Byzantine environmental ideology and history, these scholarly meditations are also a reckoning with the Anthropocene, our own era of global warming and mass extinction, offering glimpses into other ways of being in the world from which we could perhaps learn. -- Adam J. Goldwyn, Professor of English, North Dakota State University, USA

Author Bio

Laura Borghetti is a PhD candidate in Byzantine Studies and associate member of the DFG-funded Training Research Group 1876 - Early Concepts of Humans and Nature at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany.

Thomas Arentzen is Researcher in Greek Philology at Uppsala University and Senior Lecturer in Eastern Christianity at St Ignatios College (Stockholm), Sweden.