Abstract
In the Anthropocene geological era (which can be dated from the Industrial Revolution ca. 1780 to the present day), human beings have been polluting water world-wide, to the point that they are endangering their own lives and the fragile balances that should be maintained in the earth’s eco-systems. In the medieval era, human beings did not yet have the capacity to threaten their own existence through technological “advances” that could lay waste to water resources. Indeed, water – in the form of floods and storms on sea or land – was more likely to destroy humanity than humanity was to destroy water. Thus, major works of contemporary eco-criticism have focused on modern literature and culture, as does Timothy Clark’s Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshhold Concept (2015) and Jedidiah Purdy’s After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (2015). Yet medieval literature and culture is also worthy of eco-critical analysis, for the fountain-heads of modernity spring from the medieval period, and there can be no proper understanding of historical developments in the Anthropocene era without a deeper knowledge of medieval understandings of water.