Greenery: Ecocritical Readings of Late Medieval English Literature

Abstract

Rudd's book challenges any notion that ecocriticism is a critical tool that only works when analyzing texts explicitly concerned with animals and the natural world. If such a claim about ecocriticism were true, then Rudd's book would likely only scrutinize hunting treatises or fables. Instead, Greenery demonstrates ecocriticism's capacity for “devoting attention to elements of the works which are usually regarded as marginal” (11) by examining representations of nature in a staggering assortment of medieval literary genres, including lyrics, romance, Breton lays, allegory, Biblical retellings, and dream poetry. Rudd divides her book into five thematic chapters, with titles relating to their particular focus on earth, trees, seas and coasts, wilderness, and gardens and fields. Then, through a “green reading,” Rudd's study reveals how a variety of medieval writers were at significant moments in their texts concerned with many of the same issues that preoccupy contemporary environmentalists. Such issues include the human struggle to perceive nature while refraining from anthropocentric projections, and the debate over whether humans exist as a unique category of beings apart from nature. One of the book's most interesting chapters, “Earth,” is devoted to ecocritical readings of medieval lyrics. These short poems constitute, by and large, marginalized objects of study among medievalists, but Rudd breathes new life into them by exploring their wonderful ability to perform biocentric acts such as inviting readers to perceive a decomposing human corpse from the perspective of a worm. Throughout the book, Rudd adeptly models the need to remain alert to the nuances of vocabulary, for by knowing the semantic range of Middle English words for woods, earth, grove, or pond, important and interesting new readings of the texts become possible.