Ecologizing Late Ancient and Byzantine Worlds - (Sera Tela: Studies in Late Antique Literature and Its Reception) (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book investigates how Late Antique and Byzantine literary texts and other media reflect the entangled, non-binary relation between human and non-human realms, culture and nature, providing unexplored historical insights into ancient ecological perceptions.

Book Synopsis

How can we study the late ancient and Byzantine history from ecological perspectives? How might one grapple with the more-than-human in sources and media created by humans? Exploring the diverse ways in which pre-modern texts engaged with the broader natural world, this book presents scholarly ventures into the terrains of the past. From the ancient treatises on dreams to monastic tales from the Hexameron literature to the Byzantine romance, from the Exeter Bookto a mysterious Byzantine icon, the chapters investigate a diverse range of literature and other sources, uncovering intricate ecosystems of relationships.

The team of leading international experts behind the volume focuses on encounters between human and more-than-human beings. They pay attention to the entanglement of multiple agencies that cut through texts and other meshes. With insights from such theoretical traditions as ecocriticism, new materialism and environmental humanities, they re-expose ancient media to the elements.

Review Quotes

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.

About the Author

Laura Borghetti is a Doctoral Candidate in Byzantine Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany.

Thomas Arentzen is a Reader in Church History at Lund University, Sweden, and Associate Professor at Sankt Ignatios College, Stockholm School of Theology, Sweden.