The Poetics of Waste: Medieval English Ecocriticism

PMLA ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 127 (3) ◽  
pp. 460-476 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleanor Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Piers Plowman ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Poetic Language ◽  
Late Middle Ages

Waste has been a recognizable socioeconomic problem since at least the late Middle Ages. In England, because of land and labor shortages, wars, famines, and especially changes in legal and penitential discourses, waste became, by the mid–fourteenth century, a critical concept. But a fully fleshed-out vocabulary for thinking through the meaning and consequences of the practice of committing waste does not yet exist. This essay argues that two fourteenth-century poems, Wynnere and Wastoure and Piers Plowman, address the lack of such a thinking through, tackling the problem of waste in all its vicissitudes. They deploy the formal resources of poetic language—from personification to episodic structure—to draw together the various ideas of waste from other discourses and to raise medieval readers' consciousnesses about the seriousness of waste's consequences. The essay calls their use of formal resources in creating this critical discourse a “poetics of waste.”

The Virtues of Economy

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Subsequent Development ◽  
Political Society ◽  
Future Role ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City ◽  
Distinct Role

The humanist perception of fourteenth-century Rome as a slumbering ruin awaiting the Renaissance and the return of papal power has cast a long shadow on the historiography of the city. Challenging the view, this book argues that Roman political culture underwent dramatic changes in the late Middle Ages, with profound and lasting implications for the city's subsequent development. The book examines the transformation of Rome's governing elites as a result of changes in the city's economic, political, and spiritual landscape. It explores this shift through the history of Roman political society, its identity as an urban commune, and its once-and-future role as the spiritual capital of Latin Christendom. Tracing the contours of everyday Roman politics, the book reframes the reestablishment of papal sovereignty in Rome as the product of synergy between papal ambitions and local political culture. More broadly, it emphasizes Rome's distinct role in evolution of medieval Italy's city-communes.

VII.—The Argument of the Vision of Piers Plowman

PMLA ◽  
1894 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 403-450
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Deering Hanscom
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Piers Plowman ◽  
Storm And Stress ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
The Middle Ages

The fourteenth century was for England a period of storm and stress. The Saxon genius does not achieve its conquests lightly; it does not march to victory with furled flags or muffled drums; it is profoundly conscious of its own effort and the object to be realized. True, it often attains more than it hopes or even knows; but it attains the larger result through the accomplishment of the immediate purpose. The internal struggles are those that cost, with nations as with men; and it is no small part of the greatness of England that she has been able to see and strong to resist those dangers which, rising from within, have threatened to overthrow that stability which outward foes have in vain assailed. In that century which marked the close of the middle ages and the beginning of the modern era, England was busy taking cities and ruling her own spirit, and only the wise knew which was the better.

The Image of Music and the Bodies of Knowledge in the Late Middle Ages: Rhythmic Procedures as Cultural Representations

1996 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorit Tanay
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Musical Thought ◽  
Late Middle Ages

The ArgumentThe paper argues that the distinction between modernism and postmodernism can be applied metaphorically to clarify the changing image of music during the late Middle Ages. The paper discusses the scientific and rational strategies that thirteenth century musical theorists applied to revise earlier musical conceptualization. It highlights the thirteenth-century innovative affiliation of music with Aristotelian physics and argues that in a very subtle and seemingly contradictory way music theorists expressed the nascent awareness, if not tacit acknowledgment, of the mundane nature of music. It argues further that in the fourteenth century the issue of representing musical-rhythmical variability by means of a suitable language shifted to the forefront of musical theory and practice. The unprecedented emphasis on musical signs and their semantic behavior as well as the demand to demystify the discourse about rhythmical concepts — so as to question the necessity of metacategories — all point to an affinity between fourteenth century musical thought and postmodern sensibilities.

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