Green Worlds: Imagining the Land in Premodern England

Catalog description

This course will examine the powerful pull of the land on the artistic and political culture of premodern England. How do early English writers represent people's relationship to the land on which they live and from which they often make their living? What role did these representations of the land play in debates about national identity, labor, theology, and environmental change? And how do these writers evoke an affective relationship to land even as they suggest conflicting ways in which people in the period believed that land was to be used, shared, or exploited? To answer these questions, we will survey a range of literary genres inflected by the English landscape—including chivalric romance, pastoral poetry, and chorography—alongside the various technical and scientific discourses that informed everyday agricultural practice, including husbandry, gardening, surveying, natural history, and the occult arts. We will also consider how ideas about agriculture from the classical period shaped interactions with the land across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By tracking the persistence and evolution of these ideas across time, this course will interrogate the surprising and occasionally messy ways in which agricultural innovation and literary experimentation intersect and intertwine.