By: Emily Rose Krajewski
In recent decades, media, society, and scholarly thought have obsessed over issues relating to the environment. Whether through the environmental movement of the 1970s or current scientific reports of climate disaster and accompanying apocalyptic literature, the desire to be educated on environmental issues has steadily increased. Today, people have science to inform them about what is going on outside. Recent developments in technology have allowed people to understand, control, tame, harm and diagnose the environment. Such relationships with the natural world must only be possible through modern day society’s advanced science and thus, only apply to people of the present day.
As it turns out, this may be far from the truth. While the science of the Middle Ages was not quite like today, the people of this time nevertheless had to have a relationship with and perception of the environment. Survival and the proper functioning of society and its imagination (what the environment came to represent) demanded it. In premodern times, most people lived out in the countryside and were intimately reliant on the natural environment for food and other necessities (Classen, 7). Yet in a majority of research and writing, scholars have tended to overlook the role and relationship people had with the environment and, in particular, rural space. For example, early literature such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Thomas More’s Utopia ostensibly leave the environment out of the picture to emphasize the human life going on in the courts or the primacy of human law. In these works, there appears to be a turning inward toward human relationships rather than a concern with the outer, natural world.
Perhaps, as Albrecht Classen claims, scholars have simply been overlooking the role of the environment in favor of the human centric modern centers presented especially in early texts (5, 6). He suggests that the environment was not first discovered during the Renaissance, as many philosophers propose, but that texts from the Middle Ages show evidence to the contrary. It is likely people looked at rural space with curiosity, wonder and even contributed to the degradation of the space. The relationships people had with the environment were probably varied and diverse. There were probably times when the outside environment represented danger and was threatening and other times when it was a source of life and the site of human intervention. Either way, the people of the time had a noticeable awareness of rural spaces which included the village, farm, the farm animals, agricultural activities, forests, oceans, and mountains (17). With closer examination it appears that this may even be evident in the texts from these periods.
The literature produced from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period opens a window into the relationships people had with the environment at the time. One might also expect that over time perceptions of the environment gradually shift to better reflect the changes going on in society. For example, how does the perceptions of rural space contrast or interact with the fascination of the inner life of the courts in the Middle Ages? Or how might the environment be portrayed during the Renaissance, a time when art and human thought supposedly blossomed? Undoubtedly there were changes and different focuses over these time periods and looking at a variety of texts from the medieval to the Early Modern Period may help uncover some of them.
The environmental relationships people had in the past may also call to mind present-day relationships. Does nature still have the same meanings for people today as long ago? How does the relationship people maintain with the environment today compare to hundreds of years ago? Could some of the answers to these questions be at the root of the current environmental crisis? Studying past attitudes toward the environment can be helpful in revealing and critiquing the attitudes of the present day. Classen seems to consider these ideas suggesting, “In fact, the relationship between man and nature might have been closer in the premodern world than today, which would underscore even further the utmost importance of studying rural space in much greater detail” (12). To further explore these claims, this webpage will analyze the Pearl Poet’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Thomas More’s Utopia, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost in greater depth.
Additional Resources:
Timeline of the Modern Environmental Movement
Works Cited
d’ Arthois, Jacques. “Landscape with a castle and figures.” Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arthois,Jacques_d’–Landscape_with_a_castle_and_figures-_17th_century.jpg.
Classen, Albrecht. “Rural Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: A Significant Domain Ignored for Too Long By Modern Research?” in Rural Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: The Spacial Turn in Premodern Studies, edited by Albrecht Classen and Christopher Clason. ProQuest Ebook Central, 2012.