Ecocriticism and the Late Medieval

Rudd, Gillian. 2007. Greenery : ecocritical readings of late medieval English literature.

Building on the work of Douglass and Stanbury, Greenery is one of the earliest monographs exploring medieval literature from an ecocritical perspective. Rudd states in her introduction that ‘awkwardness’ is key to this work.

Douglass, Rebecca. 1998. Ecocriticism and Middle English Literature. Studies in Medievalism. 10: 144-47.

This essay introduces the idea of reading medieval literature from an ecocritical perspective. Douglass outlines her own ecocritical methodology before providing a case study examining Chaucer's The Knight's Tale and The Miller's Tale.

Stanbury, Sarah. 2004. EcoChaucer: Green Ethics and Medieval Nature. The Chaucer Review. 39 (1): 1-16.

Examines how Chaucer's work deals with human responsibility towards the nonhuman, and the way that the nonhuman can affect the human. Stanbury explores how Chaucer's idea of nature differs to our own modern conceptualisations.

Hanawalt, Barbara & Kiser, Lisa. 2008. Engaging with Nature: Essays on the Natural World and Early Modern Europe.

This volume explores the interaction of the human and nonhuman through a diverse range of essays from a variety of disciplinary fields. The essays cover discussion of scientific, philosophical and artistic aspects of late medieval literature.

Twomey, Michael. 2013. How Green was the Green Knight? Forest Ecology at Hautdesert. Arthurian Literature. 30: 27-54.

Drawing directly on the work of Gillian Rudd, Twomey concentrates on the contrasts between the forest surrounding the Green Knight’s castle as both the wild forest that Gawain journeys through before reaching the castle and a courtly hunting preserve.

2013. 'Ecomaterialism' Special Issue. Postmedieval.

This special issue of the journal Postmedieval focuses on the materiality of the nonhuman. Essay titles include 'Earth', 'Glacier', 'Fire' - with each focusing on the agency of nonhuman entities.