Apocalyptic Ecologies - by Shannon Gayk

About the Book

"In Apocalyptic Ecologies, Shannon Gayk traces the catastrophic edges of thought and writing from medieval England. As Gayk reminds us, the century leading up to the English Reformation saw a series of devastating ecological catastrophes, from floods to fires, from droughts to storms, from plagues to famine. Gayk shows how premodern writers represented eco-catastrophes in a variety of texts-in biblical drama and sermons, in apocryphal writings, lyrics, and in more familiar poems like Cleanness and Piers Plowman. By analyzing how these medieval writers coped with and depicted disasters, we can better reflect on how these kinds of texts can help us to confront our own uncertain present-and future. It will be the first book to excavate the premodern English roots of how apocalyptic discourse shapes the environmental imagination, provoking ecological awareness and care. It will be read by a wide range of scholars, including those in literary ecocriticism, religious studies, and the environmental humanities more broadly"--

Book Synopsis

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. In Apocalyptic Ecologies, Shannon Gayk traces representations of environmental calamities through medieval plays, sermons, and poetry such as Cleanness and Piers 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.

Review Quotes

"In this sensitive and searching new book, Shannon Gayk examines medieval English poems, plays, and sermons that draw on sacred history to understand the causes and consequences of such disasters, reimagining biblical stories in response to environmental catastrophes real and imagined. . . . Gayk combines research and analysis with reflections on the environments that have shaped her life, to produce a work of nuanced scholarship that is also a timely personal meditation on how we can think through apocalypses past, present, and future."-- "Comitatus"

"The author's enterprise and originality are praiseworthy . . . [Apocalyptic Ecologies] has something to say and enables others to say more, and for that reason alone deserves special notice."-- "Mediaevistik"

"A study that is both deeply personal and also a master class in the close reading of a wide swath of late medieval English literature. As such, this volume occupies that rare place where few scholarly studies ever reach: a valuable contribution to the field that can also be read with profit and enjoyment by a general audience."-- "Choice"

"Gayk stages an encounter between the endangered landscapes of the present and the disasters of Middle English literature to consider how impending doom can open new possibilities for relating to the world. The result is a uniquely affecting and persuasive methodological experiment, which brings together attentive formalism, historicist accounts of the medieval environment, and personal essays to seek new ways to cope with catastrophe across multiple scales, from the local to the cosmic. . . . Apocalyptic Ecologies is a haunting book, in the best sense of the word. It calls us to rethink what it means to read, write, and teach at a time of catastrophe and casts the love of language and love of creation as twinned aspects of committing to a dying world."-- "Review of English Studies"

"Throughout its careful studies of how writers reshaped biblical narratives, Apocalyptic Ecologies challenges the received idea of medieval Christianity as overwhelmingly anthropocentric . . . Apocalyptic Ecologies is fundamentally a work of medieval literary
criticism, emerging from its author's deep knowledge of premodern Christian thought. However, it offers several points of access for the general reader, including summaries of historical events and literary conventions."-- "ISLE"

"There is a deep beauty in the way Gayk unwraps . . . the tensions and imperfections of our engagement with the environment, both then and now."-- "Times Literary Supplement"

"Apocalyptic Ecologies offers an illuminating account of environmental thinking in premodern vernacular literature. Through beautiful readings of medieval plays and poetry, punctuated with moving reflections on her own experiences of flux in the twenty-first century, Gayk opens up medieval literature as a source of both comfort and challenge to contemporary readers living through what often seem to be the end days."--Jessica Brantley, Yale University

"Apocalyptic Ecologies will be a transformative book in premodern studies and across the environmental humanities. With eloquence and great erudition, Gayk traces the apocalyptic edges of medieval ecological imaginings, revealing vital new perspectives on a world that thought about its own end times in ways that haunt us still. A moving and powerful book."--Bruce Holsinger, University of Virginia

"At once intimate and historically far-ranging, Apocalyptic Ecologies is a lyrical meditation on how societies grapple with the effects of natural disaster. Beautifully written, it makes the compelling case that medieval writers offer us not just a pageant of weather disasters drawn from the Old and New Testaments but instead provide modern readers with urgently needed models of ecological connection and environmental stewardship."
--Kellie Robertson, University of Maryland