Waste and the Wasters

"A moving and powerful study of neglect and ecological damage as reflected in the literature of the Middle Ages." * Times Literary Supplement *
"One of those rare academic books that remixes a collection of ideas—medieval poetry, land management, weather, bees, God’s vengeance, and climate change—in a style that’s eminently readable, bringing the past to life and connecting it to the present in one engaging sentence after another." * The Christian Century *
"Lively and accessible . . . [this] powerful study of 'waste' and 'wasting' shows how premodern thinkers used the category of waste to think about the human impact on ecological and social networks. . . . Johnson convincingly argues that premodern texts can help us think through how questions of value and belief might help us respond to our ecological, political, and moral waste and waste making in our own precarious times. . . . Waste and the Wasters is a book that has much to teach us about how the ideas we hold and the language we use to think through them can have real effects on the material world. " * ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment *
"Johnson’s study of medieval legal and literary ideas of 'waste' and 'wasters' belongs on the reading list of every scholar and advanced student of the poems Winner and Waster, Piers Plowman, Chaucer’s Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, as well as anyone concerned with modern ecological crises brought on by overly personalized and privatized views of waste 'products.' " * Choice *
“Waste and the Wasters deftly maps the contours of ecosystemic imagination in medieval England through close engagement with one of its major vehicles: poetry. Johnson’s compelling study shows the importance of dealing with premodern sources in all their complexity as they work to make sense of the dense relational landscape that they inhabit and their responsibilities within it." -- Brooke Holmes, Princeton University
“Literary scholars in the Anthropocene can’t help but notice precarity, both precarity of time (there may not be much left!) and discursive precarity (does our discipline have much to offer?). Enter Eleanor Johnson. When we finish reading this vigorously conversational book, the ecosystem of our discipline will find refreshing new networks within which to work.” -- James Simpson, Harvard University
“A beautiful and urgent essay on ecosystemic thought in late medieval England that is also a call to action on the climate catastrophe now unfolding. Look to art, says Johnson, when there’s no organized vocabulary for expressions of ecosystemic peril. Look to medieval poetry to find complex and ethical ruminations on what it is to waste and to be a waster, both critical communal problems tying individuals to larger concepts of social justice. In our current eco-meltdown, this book will emphatically not waste anyone’s time.” -- Carolyn Dinshaw, New York University