The Politics of Ecology: Land, Life, and Law in Medieval Britain

by Randy P. Schiff, Joseph Taylor

Overview

If medieval literary studies is, like so many fields, currently conditioned by an ecological turn that dislodges the human from its central place in materialist analysis, then why now focus on the law? Is not the law the most human, if not indeed the human, institution? In proposing that all life in medieval Britain, whether animal or vegetable, was subject to the same legal machine that enabled claims on land, are we not ignoring the ecocritical demand that we counteract human exceptionalism and reframe the past with inhuman eyes?

This volume, edited by Randy P. Schiff and Joseph Taylor, presents a diverse and stimulating group of interconnected essays that respond to these questions by infusing biopolitical material and theory into ecocentric studies of medieval life. The Politics of Ecology: Land, Life, and Law in Medieval Britain pursues the political power of sovereign law as it disciplines and manages various forms of natural life, and discloses the literary biopolitics played out in texts that work out the fraught interactions of life and law, in all its forms. Contributors to this volume explore such issues as legal networks and death, Arthurian bare life, Chaucerian medical biopolitics, the biopolitics of fur, ecologies of sainthood, arboreal political theology, conservation and political ecology, and geographical melancholy.

Bringing together both established and rising critical voices, The Politics of Ecology creates a place for cutting-edge medievalist ecocriticism focused on the intersections of land, life, and law in medieval English, French, and Latin literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814252239
Publisher:	Ohio State University Press
Publication date:	01/01/2016
Series:	Interventions: New Studies Medieval Cult
Edition description:	1
Pages:	302
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Randy P. Schiff is Associate Professor of English at SUNY Buffalo. Joseph Taylor is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Politics of Ecology: Land, Life, and Law in Medieval Britain--RANDY P. SCHIFF AND JOSEPH TAYLOR

Part I • Biopolitics and Forest Law

1. Biopolitics in the Forest--KARL STEEL

2. Sovereign Meat: Reassembling the Hunter King from Medieval Forest Law to The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle--JEANNE PROVOST

3. The Physician and the Forester: Virginia, Venison, and the Biopolitics of Vital Property--RANDY P. SCHIFF

​Part II • Objects, Networks, and Land

4. On the Line of the Law: The London Skinners and the Biopolitics of Fur--MICHELLE R. WARREN

5. Saintly Ecologies: Tracing Collectivities in the Life of King Oswald of Northumbria--MARY KATE HURLEY

6. Undeadness and the Tree of Life: The Ecological Thought of Sovereignty--KATHLEEN BIDDICK

Part III • Politics, Affect, and Life

7  Sovereign Ecologies: Managing the King’s Bodies in Anglo-Norman Historiography--JOSEPH TAYLOR

8  Radical Conservation and the Eco-logy of Late Medieval Political Complaint--STEPHANIE L. BATKIE

9  Lost Geographies, Remembrance, and The Awntyrs off Arthure--KATHLEEN COYNE KELLY

Editorial Reviews

"Schiff and Taylor present a diverse and stimulating group of interconnected essays attending to the operations of Foucauldian 'biopolitics' and competing notions of sovereignty within an ecocritical framework, with each essay situating aspects of medieval (premodern) literature and culture at the center of its analysis." -- Jonathan Hsy, author of Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature (OSU Press)

From the Publisher