Abstract
Byzantine Ecocriticism examines the ways in which the current ecological moment, often called the Anthropocene because its defining feature is anthropogenic climate change, shapes contemporary interpretations of texts written in radically different ecological contexts. An ecocritical analysis of the dozen or so vernacular tales of love and adventure written in Greek in the Byzantine Empire between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries can reveal Byzantine environmental ideologies as well as contemporary ones, thus allowing scholarship in medieval and Byzantine studies to speak to contemporary political and environmental activist movements. The introduction concludes that an ecocritical analysis of this corpus can increase our understanding of Byzantine literature and the ways in which medieval environmental ideology continues to shape the contemporary environmental crisis.
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Notes
- 1.
Il.18.483–489. All citations in Greek from Homer, Homeri Opera and in English from Homer, Iliad.
- 2.
Owen, “The Dark Side.” For light pollution, most frequently associated with “sky glow,” that is, the ambient electric light that brightens the night sky, see Narisada and Schreuder, Light Pollution Handbook, who define the term on pages 61–78.
- 3.
Owen, “The Dark Side,” 28.
- 4.
Owen, “The Dark Side,” 28–29.
- 5.
Bogard, End of Night, 10.
- 6.
For a history of the term and the various ways in which it has been used, see Purdy, After Nature, 6 and Dawson, Extinction, 19.
- 7.
Purdy, After Nature, 9, 7. See, further, Zylinska, who writes: “This unique situation, or rather geo-historical period, in which humans are said to have become the biggest threat to life on earth, has recently gained the moniker ‘Anthropocene,’” Minimal Ethics, 10.
- 8.
Zylinska, Minimal Ethics, 19.
- 9.
Purdy, After Nature, 9.
- 10.
Narisada and Schreuder, Light Pollution, 44–50.
- 11.
Narisada and Schreuder, Light Pollution, 45.
- 12.
Narisada and Schreuder, Light Pollution, 52–54.
- 13.
Timothy Morton has suggested that ecological thought “isn’t just about global warming, recycling, and solar power. […] It has to do with love, loss, despair, and compassion. It has to do with depression and psychosis. […] It has to do with amazement, open-mindedness, and wonder” (Morton, Ecological Thought, 3).
- 14.
See, for instance, the semi-satirical obituary for the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, “which passed away after a long illness. It was 25 million years old” (Jacobson, “Obituary: Great Barrier Reef”).
- 15.
Mindful of the ways in which the positive and negative consequences of the Anthropocene accrue unequally to different peoples based on geography, class, gender, and even species, as elaborated by Dipesh Chakrabarty: “Why should one include the poor of the world—whose carbon footprint is small anyway—by use of such all-inclusive terms as species or mankind when the blame for the current crisis should be squarely laid at the door of the rich nations in the first place and of the richer classes in the poorer ones?” (Chakrabary, “The Climate of History,” 216).
- 16.
See, for instance, O’Connor, Resurrection Science.
- 17.
Buell, Environmental Imagination.
- 18.
Buell, Environmental Imagiation, 2. This idea is elsewhere echoed in writing about the Anthropocene; Timothy Morton has argued that “modern economic structures have drastically affected the environment. Yet they have had an equally damaging effect on thinking itself” (Morton, Ecological Thought, 5). Citing this line, Joanna Zylinska argues that “the Anthropocene can therefore perhaps be seen as articulating, alongside the ecological disasters, this crisis of critical thinking” (Minimal Ethics, 19). The idea is also a cornerstone of the emergent discipline of critical plant studies; Randy Laist terms this increased remove from plant-based knowledge “the defoliation of the cultural imagination” (Laist, Plants and Literature, 10), though he argues that contemporary poetry might be a different case, insofar as it “has a deep symbolic interrelationship with flowering plants” (Laist, Plants and Literature, 11).
- 19.
Buell’s subsequent definition of “an environmental text” also functions as modeling the concerns for environmental reading as critical practice, for which, see Buell, Environmental Imagination, 6–8.
- 20.
Buell, Environmental Imagination, 2.
- 21.
Huggan and Tiffin expand on this definition to focus on questions of agency and subjectivity: “The environmental imagination engages a set of aesthetic preferences for ecocriticism which is not necessarily restricted to environmental realism or nature writing, but is especially attentive to those forms of fictional and non-fictional writing that highlight nature and natural elements (landscape, flora and fauna, etc.) as self-standing agents, rather than support structures for human action” (Huggan and Tiffin, “Introduction,” 13). The term is crucial for Purdy as well, who offers a general defense of the term (Purdy, After Nature, 15–17) with particular focus on “the link between ways of seeing, encountering, and valuing the world—that is, imagination—and ways of acting, personally, politically, and legally, that have shaped the world in concrete ways” (Purdy, After Nature, 15).
- 22.
Buell, Environmental Imagination, 3.
- 23.
Glotfelty and Fromm, The Ecocriticism Reader, xviii. For a general history of the development of the field, see Buell, “Ecocriticism: Some Emerging Trends.” For a broadening of Glotfelty’s definition to include not only literature but also other forms of cultural production and other academic discourses, see Huggan and Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, for whom, though Glotfelty’s definition “remains influential, the primary role of literary analysis in ecocriticism is increasingly disputed; and, as Glotfelty herself admits, its mandate is now usually accepted as extending to the fields of environmental philosophy and bioethics” (Glotfelty, “Introduction,” 12). In their anthology of the best essays from ISLE, the discipline’s flagship publication, the journal’s editors Scott Slovic and Michel Branch take with them Glotfelty’s fundamental point about reading with the primacy of the environment, but add to it the connection to contemporary climate issues; for them, ecocriticism is “the explicit treatment of human–nonhuman relationships in literature [and] also the reading of any work of literature (in any genre) in an effort to understand its environmental implications” (Branch and Slovic, Isle Reader, xiv).
For a survey of how a variety of ecocritics in the field’s first decade defined the term, see Estok, “Report Card.” What all of these definitions have in common, he suggests, is that ecocriticism must operate with an ethics of environmental activism: “Ecocriticism has distinguished itself, debates notwithstanding, first by the ethical stand it takes, its commitment to the natural world as an important thing rather than simply as an object of thematic study, and, secondly, by its commitment to making connections. Ecocriticism may be many other things besides, but it is always at least these two” (Estok, “Report Card,” 220).
- 24.
In her 1996 introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader, Glotfelty asserts that “the taxonomic name of this green branch of literary study is still being negotiated” (Glotfelty, “Introduction,” xix) and offers as possible synonyms “ecopoetics, environmental literary criticism, and green cultural studies” (Glotfelty, “Introduction,” xx). Glotfelty further notes that each of these names comes with its own advantages and problems, and that, in fact, “Many critics write environmentally conscious criticism without needing or wanting a specific name for it” (Glotfelthy, “Introduction,” xx). In his 2002 reappraisal of the discipline, Buell rejects the term he himself had done so much to popularize; even as he acknowledges that “ecocriticism’ may well be here to stay,” he suggests instead the term “environmental criticism” (Buell, Future of Environmental Criticism, 11). His “reason for belaboring the terminological issue is the implicit narrowness of the ‘eco,’ insofar as it connotes the ‘natural’ rather than the ‘built’ environment” (Buell, Future of Environmental Criticism, 11). In the ten years since the publication of The Future of Environmental Criticism, however, even as the interaction between the built and natural environments that caused Buell to propose the new term has become increasingly incorporated into ecocritical discourse, Buell’s preferred term for emphasizing that theoretical distinction has neither slowed the increasing hegemony of “ecocriticism” as the disciplinary marker nor gained traction as an independent term in its own right, and it is both to avoid any such terminological confusion and to place my own work within this larger intellectual movement that I have chosen to use “ecocriticism” in my own title.
- 25.
For such histories, see, for instance, Egan, Green Shakespeare, 17–44 and especially Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism, 1–28. For an early account of ecocriticism outside academic publishing, see Parini, “The Greening of the Humanities,” and for a brief account of its relevance to medieval ecocriticism, see Rudd, Greenery, 4–11.
- 26.
See, for instance, Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction, Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction and Dawson Extinction.
- 27.
Glotfelty, “Introduction,” xvi. For a similar response, see Egan, Green Shakespeare, 1.
- 28.
Parini, “The Greening of the Humanities,” 52.
- 29.
See also Newman, “Marxism and Ecocriticism,” for a summary of many of the important mission statements of early ecocritics connecting the discipline’s academic and scholarly aims with its political and activist ones. Newman discusses, for instance, William Rueckert’s 1978 “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism,” which argues for, above all, “a principle of relevance” in literary theory (2).
- 30.
Howarth, “Some Principles,” 69.
- 31.
For recent works that aim at the intersection of ecocriticism and other post-structuralist theories, see Sturgeon, Environmentalism in Popular Culture and Adams and Gruen, Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections.
- 32.
Gaard, “Living Interconnections,” 1. Gaard elaborates on these ideas in “Toward a Queer Ecofeminism.” For a history of ecofeminism as political action, see Adams and Gruen, Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections, which begins with Edith Ward’s 1892 claim that “the case of the animal is the case of the woman” (7) and continues through the 1990 March on Washington (20). For a brief outline of an ecofeminist paradigm for reading medieval romances, see Heller, “For the Love of Nature.” Scholars in the related discipline of animal studies have similarly noted the intersectionality of their work with these concerns; for which, see, for instance, Weil, Thinking Animals, xviii, and the addition of “speciesism” to the list of oppressive patriarchal ideologies that already included sexism and racism.
- 33.
Eaton and Lorentzen, “Introduction,” 1.
- 34.
Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson, “Introduction,” 5.
- 35.
Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson, “Introduction,” 27. The citation is from Stein, Rachel, ed. New Perspectives on Environmental Justice: Gender, Sexuality and Activism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004.
- 36.
Huggan and Tiffin, “Introduction,” 12. The citation is from Cilano, Cara and Elizabeth DeLoughrey. “Against Authenticity: Global Knowledges and Postcolonial Ecocriticism.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 14, no. 1 (2007), 71–86.
- 37.
Huggan and Tiffin, “Introduction,” 13.
- 38.
Huggan and Tiffin, “Introduction,” 6.
- 39.
Huggan and Tiffin, “Introduction,” 12. For their definition of what constitutes advocacy in scholarship, see Huggan and Tiffin, “Introduction,” 13ff.
- 40.
Huggan and Tiffin, “Introduction,” 22.
- 41.
Moore, “Introduction,” 1.
- 42.
Moore, “Introduction,” 2.
- 43.
Moore, “Introduction,” 2. For an earlier similar Marxist ecocritical assertion of intersectionality, see Newman, “Marxism and Ecocriticism”: “At a time when it is becoming clear that environmental destruction is a feature of modern societies as pervasive and persistent as racial and sexual oppression, ecocriticism has begun a crucial expansion of the vibrant tradition of radical scholarship” (3).
- 44.
Newman, “Marxism and Ecocriticism,” 3.
- 45.
Estok, Ecocriticism and Shakespeare, 2. Similar assertions concerning Shakespearean analysis are made in Strickler, “Sex and the City,” while Glotfelty also equates feminism and post-colonialism with ecocriticism (Glotfelty, “Introduction,” xviii). Borlik, Ecocriticism and Early Modern Green Literature also offers a model of ecocriticism without making explicit its connection to contemporary political concerns, and yet his discussion of the fears of environmental instability caused by, for instance, a population boom, deforestation, and air pollution, and the government’s attempts to ameliorate this environmental degradation through increased regulation, can be implicitly read alongside a contemporary context.
- 46.
Egan, Green Shakespeare, 3.
- 47.
Bat, Song of the Earth, 266.
- 48.
Egan, Green Shakespeare, 44.
- 49.
Kiser, “Chaucer and the Politics of Nature,” 41.
- 50.
Douglass, “Ecocriticism and Middle English Literature,” 138; quoted also in Rudd, Greenery, 4.
- 51.
Douglass, “Ecocriticism and Middle English Literature,” 159.
- 52.
Though she does add that “a thoughtful critic might also consider whether the text does in fact set out to do what he or she feels it ought: is a conservationist message the point of the work?” (Douglass, “Ecocriticism and Middle English Literature,” 138). In this, she presages an apolitical branch of ecocriticism best articulated by Jonathan Bate. In his 2002 Song of the Earth, Bate argues that “it would be quixotic to suppose that a work of literary criticism might be an appropriate place in which to spell out a practical programme for better environmental management. That is why ecopoetics should begin not as a set of assumptions or proposals about particular environmental issues, but as a way of reflecting upon what it means to dwell with the earth. Ecopoetics must concern itself with consciousness” (Bate, Song of the Earth, 266). In response to this line, Egan argues that “Bate’s claim that ecocriticism should be necessarily non- (or in his phrase pre-) political is as absurd as it would be in the fields of Marxist, feminist, postcolonial and queer criticism” (Egan, Green Shakespeare, 44).
- 53.
The study of nature in the environment has long been an important area of inquiry in medieval literature; the distinction here is between analyses of nature from a literary perspective and the analysis of literature from an ecocritical perspective. Works on natural themes without the explicit use of an ecocritical framework include, for example, such work as Stone, Ethics of Nature; Hanawalt and Kiser, Engaging with Nature; and Howe and Wolfe, Inventing Medieval Landscapes. Although Howe and Wolfe themselves do not use the term, one reviewer noted that “this volume may likely become a foundational text in medievalist ecocriticism” (Faletra, “Review,” 101). Among such works too must be classed the older but still influential collection of Pearsall and Salter, Landscapes and Seasons of the Medieval World.
- 54.
Rudd, Greenery, 6.
- 55.
Rudd, Greenery, 5.
- 56.
Kordecki, Ecofeminist Subjectivities, 6. She does allow that “in some quarters, the discipline emerges as an advocate for social or political change” (Kordecki, Ecofeminist Subjectivities, 6).
- 57.
Egan, Green Shakespeare, 3.
- 58.
Indeed, the medieval past as modern cultural critique is the thrust of, for instance, Tolkien’s Modern Middle Ages—edited by Siewers—which connects that neomedieval work both to Tolkien’s own time (i.e. as an allegory of World War I) and to contemporary issues such as critical race theory.
- 59.
Johnson, “Ecomedievalism,” 31.
- 60.
And echoes their claims about the value of medieval ecocriticism for understanding the roots of the current ecological moment: “A green reading of Chaucer, Shakespeare , or a modernist poet helps articulate the past with immediate benefit to the present” (Johnson, “Ecomedievalism,” 31 n.2).
- 61.
Buell, “Some Emerging Trends,” 105.
- 62.
Buell, “Ecocriticism: Some Emerging Trends,” 91, 93.
- 63.
Following Rudd, Scarborough offers a pre-political version of ecocriticism: “By concentrating on canonical works that have been examined from a variety of other critical viewpoints, this study hopes to add another level of awareness to the natural phenomena included in them” (Scarborough, Inscribing the Environment, 1). The rhetoric of “awareness” and, later, “clues to the authors’ understanding of the natural world,” as well as the omission of an acknowledgment of the explicitly activist movements within ecocriticism, mark the work’s approach.
- 64.
White, “Historical Roots,” 10.
- 65.
See, for instance, Siewer, Strange Beauty, which focuses only on the symbolic significance of the sea in Irish lore.
- 66.
For two non-ecocritical works that nevertheless examine similar considerations of ecclesiastical power and perceptions of ecology and the environment, see Della Dora, Landscape, Nature, and the Sacred and Theokritoff, Living in God’s Creation.
- 67.
An interesting example of the ways in which ecocriticism, animal studies , and Marxist and postcolonial criticism intersect in this regard in medieval England is Dorothy Yamamoto’s examination of the way the creation of royal game preserves by the Norman conquerors of England, which disrupted the economies and food chains of the indigenous Saxon inhabitants, led to a variety of legal regulations and disciplinary measures (103ff.).
- 68.
As, for instance, the chapter on “Animals and Magic in Byzantine Art” in Dauterman Maguire and Maguire, Other Icons, 58–96.
- 69.
See, for instance, Dauterman Maguire and Maguire, Other Icons, who argue: “In the imperial palace, art combined with cuisine to project messages of imperial mastery and control. The exotic dishes of the imperial table and the astonishing acrobatics that accompanied them were both part of a larger theater of the Byzantine court that was intended to demonstrate the emperor’s special power over nature” (42).
- 70.
Cupane and and Krönung, Fictional Storytelling, is the latest entry in the expanding bibliography on this subject, and shows also the interest not just in Byzantine–European relations, the traditional framework for this kind of study, but now also the increasing recognition of Byzantine relations with Asia. The background to and future of the field in this regard is Panagiotis Agapitos’ “Contesting Conceptual Boundaries: Byzantine Literature and Its History,” in which he argues for a broader understanding of Byzantine literary history geographically and temporally.
- 71.
Steel, How to Make a Human.
- 72.
Patriarchy has become a widely accepted if hotly contested term; perhaps the earliest use of the term in Byzantine studies was by Catia Galatariotou in 1984, where she defines it as “a system of social order in which power and the means of acquiring it and perpetuating it (economic, political, ideological) has been assumed by the male sex,” though she rightly cautions against a universalist notion, suggesting that it is “as varied and elaborate as the forces at play within each historical moment” (Galatariotou, “Holy Women and Witches,” 56, 57).
- 73.
Thus leading, for instance, to Myrto Veikou’s characterization of this work as “an excellent way of adopting approaches from other fields while theoretically updating them […] by diverting this practice’s theoretical framework, away from political connotations previously attributed to it by other scholars and towards a different, highly meaningful use in the investigation of historical cultures” (Veikou, “Space in Texts and Space as Text,” 147). As will be made clear from what follows, I would like to revise my own position on the separation of the contemporary/political from the historical/scholarly.
- 74.
Douglass 1998 argues along similar lines that “possibly the most important part of this project is then an effort to determine both what ecocriticism can do for medieval studies and what medieval studies can do for the environment” (138), an early acknowledgment of the difficulty of finding relevance between medieval literature and the current environmental context.
- 75.
Douglass, “Ecocriticism,”138.
- 76.
See, for instance, Veronica della Dora’s Landscape, Nature, and the Sacred in Byzantium, which, though not explicitly ecocritical, nevertheless addresses the confluence of power and perception, noting the ways in which imperial and ecclesiastical ideologies shaped the construction of nature and the natural world.
- 77.
Zylinska, The Ethics of Cultural Studies, ix and esp. ix n.1 for bibliography on the ethical turn. Boothroyd, Ethical Subjects in Contemporary Cultures builds on this idea (3ff.). See also Davis and Womack, Mapping the Ethical Turn.
- 78.
American Historical Association, “Statements and Resolutions of Support.”
- 79.
“The Executive Council regularly considers academic and public policy matters and often writes letters, statements, or guidelines to address these matters” (Modern Language Association, “Executive Council Actions”).
- 80.
Society for Classical Studies, “SCS Policy on Public Statements.”
- 81.
Archaeological Institute of America, “Site Preservation: Advocacy.”
- 82.
Society for American Archaeology, “Government Affairs Program.”
- 83.
This might also have to do with the issue of contemporary relevance: disciplines that are more directly engaged with contemporary issues more frequently have such positions on their websites. See, for instance, the advocacy statements on the websites of the Association for Asian American Studies (“Advocacy”) and the American Studies Association (“Resolutions and Actions”).
- 84.
Weil, Thinking Animals, 16.
- 85.
In her study of medieval animals, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages, Joyce Salisbury focuses on the rhetoric of care: “We treat pets with much the same care that we give humans, acknowledging in our care our kinship with them” (2). She also suggests the connection of her own work on the medieval human–animal dichotomy with contemporary issues: “Many of our controversial animal-rights issues derive from this blurring of the boundaries between humans and animals. If there is no difference between us, should we eat animals? […] Further, once we believe that animals and humans share feelings in common, should we hunt and trap animals, knowing that such treatment would cause us pain? Should we use animals in medical experiments when we would not use humans? I hope to provide a background for these discussions by looking at a view of animals different from our own and seeing the transformation of this view” (2). Salisbury, like the ecocritics who would emerge in the next decades, connects the political and cultural debates of our own time to her study of animals in the Middle Ages through the by now familiar pre-political rhetoric of “providing background,” a claim in line with other ecocritics’ search for the roots or origins of contemporary ideology in pre-modern texts. In another example of the way in which increasing engagement of these questions within Byzantine Studies would allow for greater visibility within Medieval Studies as a whole, Salisbury, despite the title of her work, confines herself to the Latin West; neither Byzantium nor Constantinople appear in her index; one of the few references to the post-Classical Greek tradition is Jon Climacus’ discussion of bestiality (88).
- 86.
Such questions have already begun to be explored by Western medievalists. In “Legible Skins,” Sarah Kay suggests that “the parchment book brings its own ethos along with it, and this article explores the ethics of reading that the encounter with it involves” (14), concluding that “in the Middle Ages the acts of reading and writing are located in the context of the systematic exploitation of animals, and more generally of a power hierarchy in which the skins of weaker animals may be used as a writing surface for the exploits of those that are stronger” (30).
- 87.
Glenn Peers’ recent book review essay addresses somewhat the questions of both the Anthropocene and the role of ivory in his discussion of a Byzantine ivory diptych picturing Adam naming the animals. Peers does not address the question of the ethics of contemporary art historians’ use of ivory, instead demonstrating how the materiality of the object itself as bone demonstrates the link between the humans and animals depicted on it (Peers, “Adam’s Anthropocene ”).
- 88.
See, for instance, Curry, “Climate Change,” for a survey of some sites at risk due to climate change, and Van der Noort, Climate Change Archaeology, for the ways in which archaeology can offer insight into current rising sea levels.
- 89.
Boothroyd, Ethical Subjects, 3.
- 90.
For further discussion of the subjectivity of the Other and its roots in Levinasian ethical philosophy, see Boothroyd 3ff.
- 91.
Transliteration of the name of the work has varied, with Digenes Akrites, Digenes Akritas, and other forms being used interchangeably in the scholarship. I have followed each author’s own spelling when quoting, and followed Jeffreys’ use of Digenis Akritis elsewhere.
- 92.
Beaton, Medieval Greek Romance, 185. Recent scholarship has challenged the early dating. Though the stories might be early, the oldest surviving manuscript is from later, a point emphasized by Charis Messis: “While the dating of the Urtext to the twelfth century is a conjecture, based on scattered references and the ‘common sense’ of modern scholars, the dating of the Grottaferrata version to the fourteenth century is a textual reality that we need to take into serious consideration” (Messis, “The relationship between romance and hagiography”). See also Livanos, “A Case Study in Byzantine Dragon-Slaying,” with bibliography, and Beaton, Medieval Greek Romance, 30. For the complicated textual and manuscript tradition, see Jeffreys, introduction to Digenis Akritis , xvlii–xxx.
- 93.
For the definitional parameters of the genre and a history of its development, see Beaton, The Medieval Greek Romance and the critical response by Agapitos and Smith, The Study of the Medieval Greek Romance. A different set of generic qualifiers can also be found in the so-called SO Debate, for which, see Agapitos, “Genre, Structure and Poetics in the Byzantine Vernacular Romances of Love,” and the various responses, which remains one of the most important discussions of the romances. For the works included in (and excluded from) the genre, their dates, and a rationale for the generic taxonomy, see Agapitos, “Genre, Structure and Poetics,” 12–26, esp. 12–14.
Further subdivisions can be made based on chronology and other generic aspects; the twelfth-century Komnenian novels, named after the dynasty under which they were produced, draw more heavily from the ancient novel and feature more realistic depictions of society and nature than do the later Palaiologan romances, which are more closely related to the chivalric narratives of Western Europe. As with any genre, disputes inevitably seem to arise over names, boundaries, and qualifiers; following Beaton and Agapitos and Smith, “romances” seems the best umbrella term for these kinds of narratives, and so will be used here.
- 94.
As detailed in Nilsson, “Romantic Love in Rhetorical Guise,” 46–56.
- 95.
Beaton, Medieval Greek Romance, xiii.
- 96.
Viswanathan, Masks, xi.
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Goldwyn, A.J. (2018). Byzantine Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis. In: Byzantine Ecocriticism. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69203-6_1
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