Presenter: Becca Marshall
Mentors: Michael Peixoto, Honors College History; Helen Southworth, Literature
Oral Presentation
Major: Environmental Studies
In the past religious concepts of creation mediated a relationship between humans and their surrounding environment. During the early Middle Ages literature and the presence of the Church in the landscape worked in conversation with biblical and metaphorical interpretations of nature to shape humans’ perception of their place in the environment. The central role of religion and its influence on environmental depictions emerges in chiliastic sources, such as Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Within these texts lands and specific sites are imbued with religious/divine qualities and values. Additionally, a large amount of environmental mentions in monastic annals depict wondrous and fantastical events. Which provides insight into the significance of these happenings for the people of the medieval period. Along with this, the work of Ellen F. Arnold on monastic culture in the Ardennes forest suggests a diverse understanding of monks connection to nature including their views of the natural world as a wilderness, a source of human salvation, and even as a pastoral heaven. Other important depictions of the land and its association to the supernatural exist in poetry, medieval folklore, and popular stories such as Beowulf. All of these literary mediums frequently contain religious undertones and illustrate ways in which people are connecting to the land. Medieval cosmological views framed a world that moved ever closer toward the last judgment and the ultimate end of the world. This teleological focus, particularly prevalent in millenarian and quasi-historical writing, situated/informed man’s encounters with nature as fundamentally ephemeral while also imbuing them with deep symbolic significance. By analyzing chiliastic and literary sources from the early middle ages my research presents the way in which the literature and religion in the early Middle Ages worked in tandem to inform the peoples’ perception of the environment. Hence, a greater sense of humans’ tenor of life at this time can be unearthed by examining the multi- dimensional role of nature-as their physical abode, and as a symbol of the divine and the harsh, unforgiving reality of existence.