Appendix: Further Reading

Summary

WHILE IT is impossible to be exhaustive in drawing together all works that have touched on trees, vegetation, and their derivatives in medieval studies and allied fields, here we bring together some of the research in this area from recent decades. Scholarship on medieval English literary-historical contexts has mainly focused on the later Middle Ages, often crossing disciplines, time periods, and forms of evidence, such as Derek Pearsall and Elizabeth Salter's foundational Landscapes and Seasons of the Medieval World. An influential early collection on plant-life in early medieval England, From Earth to Art, was edited by Carole Biggam, including work by Jennifer Neville, who like Heide Estes, published a seminal monograph on representations of the natural world in Old English literary landscapes and environments. Della Hooke produced a landmark account of trees and woodland in early medieval England in Trees in Anglo-Saxon England, covering their appearances in the physical and textual landscapes of the period and their role in material culture and religious belief. Bintley has worked on the same region, considering visual and material culture including stone sculpture and archaeology, together with Old English and Old Norse texts, in Trees in the Religions of Early Medieval England. Work on trees in Old Norse literature and material culture has been relatively limited until recently. Clive Tolley explored the literary evidence thoroughly for its mythology, with Carl Phelpstead producing the first dedicated ecocritical study of a Norse saga (Eyrbyggja saga), and Christopher Abram the first book-length work of ecocriticism in the field. More recently, trees and woodland have also been tackled by Eleanor Barraclough, Alaric Hall, and Shamira Meghani, in a burgeoning of article-length works in Norse studies focused on trees.

A review of recent scholarship by Danielle Allor and Haylie Swenson in postmedieval draws together a number of influential publications in the later Middle Ages and Early Modern era. Allor and Swenson's review forms part of a postmedieval special edition on ‘Premodern Plants’, whose direct aim, editor Vin Nardizzi writes, is to encourage readers ‘to further explore the discourses and the material practices associated with premodern plants’.