This collection is the inaugural publication of the Oecologies research cluster, a gathering of literary scholars in the Pacific Northwest who critically return to ecology's premodern predecessor, oecology, in medieval and Renaissance archives. They seek to practice what Ursula K. Heise describes in the afterword as “historical eco-cosmopolitanism,” an elaboration of her earlier argument for planetary citizenship in Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (2008) but, this time, with a bent toward the past. Whereas eco-cosmopolitanism initially emphasized “a concept of place ‘as an indispensable condition for environmental ethics,’” the authors in this volume consider how the literary past provides “touchstones” for environmental engagement in the ongoing moment of climate crisis (285).
While such thinking might seem unbecomingly presentist for scholars of distant literary periods, these essays cleverly rethink history's relationship to the present in ways that are not linear but rather scalar, composite, and fleeting. The most novel is Jeffrey J. Cohen's theorization of “eco-temps,” a phenomenon prompted by the medieval materializations of climat and sesoun in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. For Cohen, they enact “composites of time and climate, ephemeral locales that through repetition endure to bequeath across history a multisensory archive” (29). The knotting of ecological time to geographic space is as much sensorial as it is aesthetic. In fact, the collection's editors, Vin Nardizzi and Tiffany Jo Werth, urge their readers to recognize that “the temporal is inextricably enmeshed with the territorial” (8).
What makes these essays distinct—indeed, timely and necessary—is their deep embeddedness in the authors’ local environments. Prior to writing, the contributors were asked to address how the landscapes where they live, study, and teach influence their approaches to premodern literature. Home is the starting point for historical eco-cosmopolitanism. Take, for example, Patricia Badir's beautifully photographed chapter on British Columbia's Kettle Valley Railway, a defunct and dilapidated system of train stations named for Shakespeare's best-known characters. Her own backyard magnifies the immediate and proximal stakes of an ecosystem trending toward ruin, one that seems to allegorically follow in the ruinous footsteps of Shakespeare's fallen: Othello, Juliet, Lear. Similarly, J. Allan Mitchell spotlights a local artifact of environmental significance in Ontario's Museum of History: an astrolabe of uncertain provenance that materializes temporal and spatial dislocation. The object, he argues, is “an ecological interface among times, places, polities” and, as such, unsettles colonial narratives of national belonging (278). Both essays make connections among “the local, the global, and what lies in between” by attending to what Heise identifies as “different scales, power structures, and cultural boundaries . . . that inflect place and planet-consciousness today” (287).
The book contains two types of essays. The first are longer meditations on “the environmental conditions and histories” of home and their impacts on premodern research and pedagogy (11). The second are shorter companion essays that respond to the central questions of the former. One of the most electric pairings is that of Sharon O'Dair and David K. Coley. O'Dair takes a hard look at the profession and reveals how the economic model of the neoliberal university is unsustainable, both professionally and environmentally. To redress our carbon debt, she urges scholars to return to a slower pace, “to a life based in sundry crafts, or methods, and the study of them, a life of a certain asceticism” (171). Coley follows O'Dair with a harrowing vision of environmental failure: what happens when connectedness and cosmopolitanism lead to epidemiological emergency, as was historically the case with medieval plague. His essay ends with an admission of a professional sort of environmental failure: “a failure of my own will to untie my research from the comfortable moorings of history and bring it to bear on the crises of the present” (191).
Although Nardizzi and Werth coordinate the collection around couplings, the result is far less tidy. Much crosstalk occurs among the authors as the essays touch and then depart from one another, often careening in disparate yet equally fascinating directions. The editors see the book as a transit map, “a conversation from different hubs,” and an exercise in translation across geotemporal locales (10). Premodern Ecologies is a significant contribution to medieval and Renaissance ecocriticism but is, above all, a much-needed provocation to reimagining the ways we teach, conduct research, and inhabit our “multiculture and multispecies communities” as planetary citizens (287).
