PUBLIC LECTURE: Against the grain: Reading the Book of Nature

Speaker: Dr Philippa Maddern, UWA

For medieval writers, ‘nature’ had an extraordinarily wide range of significance. Profound generic chasms separated the manorial account roll recording in apparently passionless detail the monetary value of woodlands, fields and meadows; the medieval romance, locating knightly ‘adventure’ in highly fictionalised forests; the tract on geomancy, explaining how personal and political futures could literally be ‘read’ in the earth; or the learned encyclopaedia, encouraging readers to view the natural world either as an allegorical figure of wisdom, or as a divinely-authored ‘Book’ through which theological truths could be discovered. Medieval environmental historians, therefore, should ideally read their material—both archaeological or textual—against its grain, and in relationship to the various genres of environmental discourse. This lecture will address such questions as how the 12th–13th centuries (a period of heavy deforestation) developed the highly popular genre of forest romances? How and why late-medieval English writers, living in a period of apparent climatic turmoil, produced literary pictures of a static environment? And what were the connections between the perception of the natural world as a divinely-authored text, and the perception of nature as a result and testimony of Adam and Eve’s fall from grace?