Albrecht Classen, Water in Medieval Literature: An Eco-Critical Reading. New York and London: Lexington Books, 2018. pp. 311.

Abstract

In the Anthropocene geological era (which can be dated from the Industrial Revolution ca. 1780 to the present day), human beings have been polluting water world-wide, to the point that they are endangering their own lives and the fragile balances <?page nr="238"?>that should be maintained in the earth’s eco-systems. In the medieval era, human beings did not yet have the capacity to threaten their own existence through technological “advances” that could lay waste to water resources. Indeed, water – in the form of floods and storms on sea or land – was more likely to destroy humanity than humanity was to destroy water. Thus, major works of contemporary eco-criticism have focused on modern literature and culture, as does Timothy Clark’s Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshhold Concept (2015) and Jedidiah Purdy’s After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (2015). Yet medieval literature and culture is also worthy of eco-critical analysis, for the fountain-heads of modernity spring from the medieval period, and there can be no proper understanding of historical developments in the Anthropocene era without a deeper knowledge of medieval understandings of water.