Waste and the Wasters

A groundbreaking examination of ecological thought in medieval England.

While the scale of today’s crisis is unprecedented, environmental catastrophe is nothing new. Waste and the Wasters studies the late Middle Ages, when a convergence of land contraction, soil depletion, climate change, pollution, and plague subsumed Western Europe. In a culture lacking formal scientific methods, the task of explaining and coming to grips with what was happening fell to medieval poets. The poems they wrote used the terms “waste” or “wasters” to anchor trenchant critiques of people’s unsustainable relationships with the world around them and with each other. In this book, Eleanor Johnson shows how poetry helped medieval people understand and navigate the ecosystemic crises—both material and spiritual—of their time.