Ecologizing Late Ancient and Byzantine Worlds

How can we study the late ancient and Byzantine history from ecological perspectives? How might one grapple with the more-than-human in sources and media created by humans? Exploring the diverse ways in which pre-modern texts engaged with the broader natural world, this book presents scholarly ventures into the terrains of the past. From the ancient treatises on dreams to monastic tales from the Hexameron literature to the Byzantine romance, from the Exeter Book to a mysterious Byzantine icon, the chapters investigate a diverse range of literature and other sources, uncovering intricate ecosystems of relationships. The team of leading international experts behind the volume focuses on encounters between human and more-than-human beings. They pay attention to the entanglement of multiple agencies that cut through texts and other meshes. With insights from such theoretical traditions as ecocriticism, new materialism and environmental humanities, they re-expose ancient media to the elements. Ecologizing Late Ancient and Byzantine Worlds explores late ancient and Byzantine media from an ecological view point and with a special focus on non-human agencies. How are such agencies entangled in the human elements – whether in the human media itself or the human characters of literary texts? How were these media once weathered by concrete ancient elements, and how can we re-expose them – to the weather of ecological readings? By applying an interdisciplinary approach that merges the fields of literature, history, and religious studies in the service of ecocriticism, the chapters highlight diverse ways in which premodern writers engaged with the non-human world. The integration of ecological perspectives into late ancient and Byzantine studies is a remarkably recent development. This book aims to pioneer the interweaving of late ancient and Byzantine studies with ecocriticism. From the ancient treatises on dreams to monastic tales, from the Hexameron literature to the Byzantine novel, from the Exeter Book to a mysterious Byzantine icon, the book investigates a diverse range of media to uncover the intricacies of relationships in the natural world. It aims to illustrate how these media are not only repositories of cultural and intellectual history but also valuable chests of ecological awareness, by overcoming the binary antinomy of culture and nature, human and non-human. To what degree do these media imply the agency of landscapes, plants, animals, and other natural phenomena? To what degree do they comprise literary exploitations of other species? Ecologizing Late Ancient and Byzantine Worlds draws contemporary relevance from these ancient perspectives, offering thought-provoking insights for the ecological challenges of our time.