Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T13:57:29.847Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Towards a Byzantine ecocriticism: witches and nature control in the medieval Greek romance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Adam J. Goldwyn
Adam J. Goldwyn*
Affiliation:
North Dakota State University
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Since its rise in the mid-1990s, ecocriticism, the study of the depiction of the built and natural environments in literature, has been deeply engaged with contemporary political and social issues surrounding anthropogenic ecological degradation and climate change. Such an ideological outlook, however, limits the application of the discourse in the case of medieval literature, which lacks such contemporary resonance. Ecocritical and ecofeminist analyses of the three witches with power over the environment in the Byzantine romances and their western analogues will nevertheless demonstrate the connection between nature control, femininity and patriarchal oppression and, as importantly, offer a theoretical framework for the application of an apolitical ecocriticism to Byzantine (and medieval) literature.

Type
Articles
Information
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , 2015 , pp. 66 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 2015

References

1 In her 1996 introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader, Cheryl Glotfelty asserts that ‘the taxonomie name of this green branch of literary study is still being negotiated’, Glotfelty, C. and Fromm, H., eds., The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens and London, 1996) xix Google Scholar, and offers as possible synonyms ‘ecopoetics, environmental literary criticism, and green cultural studies’ (op. cit. xviii, xx, italics in original). Glotfelty further notes that each of these names comes with its own advantages and problems, and that, in fact, ‘Many critics write environmentally conscious criticism without needing or wanting a specific name for it’ (op. cit. xx). In his 2002 reappraisal of the discipline, Lawrence Buell, among the most prominent theorists of ecocriticism, rejected the term he himself had done so much to popularize; even as he acknowledges that ‘“ecocriticism” may well be here to stay,’ he suggests instead the term ‘environmental criticism’, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Oxford 2005) 11. His ‘reason for belaboring the terminological issue is the implicit narrowness of the ‘eco,’ insofar as it connotes the ‘natural’ rather than the ‘built’ environment’ (op. cit. 11). In the ten years since The Future of Environmental Criticism, however, even as the interaction between the built and natural environments that caused Buell to propose the new term has become increasingly incorporated into ecocritical discourse, Buell’s preferred term for emphasizing that theoretical distinction has neither slowed the increasing hegemony of ‘ecocriticism’ as the disciplinary marker, nor gained traction as an independent term in its own right, and it is both to avoid any such terminological confusion and to place my own work within this larger intellectual movement that I have chosen to use ‘ecocriticism’ in my own title.

2 For such histories, see, for instance, Egan, G., Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism (New York 2006)Google Scholar, Estok, S.. Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia (New York 2011) 17–44 CrossRefGoogle Scholar and esp. Buell, The Future, 1-28. For an early account of ecocriticism outside academic publishing, see J. Parini, ‘The greening of the humanities’, New York Times, Oct. 29, 1995, 52-53 and for a brief account of its relevance to medieval ecocriticism, see Rudd, G., Greenery: Ecocritical Readings of Late Medieval English Literature (Manchester 2007) 4–11 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Glotfelty and Fromm, Ecocriticism Reader, xvi. For a similar response, see Egan, Green Shakespeare, 1.

4 Parini, ‘The greening of the humanities’, 52.

5 For a brief outline of an ecofeminist paradigm for reading medieval romances, see Chania Heller’s contribution to Heller, C., ‘For the love of nature: ecology and the cult of the romantic’, in Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature, ed. Gaard, G. (Philadelphia 1993) 219-12Google Scholar.

6 Eaton, H. and Lorentzen, L. A. (eds.), Ecofeminism and Globalization: Exploring Culture, Context, and Religion (Lanham, MD 2003) 1 Google Scholar.

7 Gaard, G.. ‘Living interconnections with animals and nature’, in Gaard, G. (ed.), Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature (Philadelphia 1993) 1–12, here at 1Google Scholar.

8 Estok, Ecocriticism and Shakespeare, 2. Similar assertions concerning Shakespearean analysis are made in Strickler, B., ‘Sex and the city: An ecocritical perspective on the place of gender and race in Othello ’, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 12.2 (2005) 119–137 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, while Glotfelty also equates feminism and postcolonialism with ecocriticism (Glotfelty and Fromm, Ecocriticism Reader, xviii).

9 Egan, Green Shakespeare, 3.

10 Douglass, R., ‘Ecocriticism and Middle English literature’, Studies in Medievalism 10 (1998) 136–163 Google Scholar, here at 138, quoted also in Rudd, Greenery, 4.

11 Though she does add that ‘a thoughtful critic might also consider whether the text does in fact set out to do what he or she feels it ought: is a conservationist message the point of the work?’ (Douglass, ‘Ecocriticism and Middle English literature’, 138).

12 Bate, J., The Song of the Earth (London 2000) 266 Google Scholar. In response to this line, Egan argues that ‘Bate’s claim that ecocriticism should be necessarily non- (or in his phrase pre-) political is as absurd as it would be in the fields of Marxist, feminist, postcolonial and queer criticism’ (Egan, Green Shakespeare, 44).

13 Bate, Song, 266.

14 Douglass, ‘Ecocriticism and Middle English literature’, 159.

15 The study of nature in the environment has long been an important area of inquiry in medieval literature; the distinction here is between analyses of nature from a literary perspective and the analysis of literature from a naturalist, or ecocritical, perspective. Works on natural themes without the explicit use of an ecocritical framework include, for example, such work as Stone, G.. The Ethics of Nature in the Middle Ages: On Boccaccio’s Poetaphysics (New York 1998)Google Scholar; Hanawalt, B. and Kiser, L. (eds.), Engaging with Nature: Essays on the Natural World in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Notre Dame 2008)Google Scholar; Howe, J. and Wolfe, M. (eds.), Inventing Medieval Landscapes: Senses of Place in Western Europe (Gainesville 2002)Google Scholar; although the editors themselves do not use the term, one reviewer noted that ‘this volume may likely become a foundational text in medievalist ecocriticism’ (M. Faletra, ‘Rev. of Howe and Wolfe [2002]’; Arthuriana 14.1 [2004] 101-2) and the older but still influential collection of Pearsall, D. and Salter, E. (eds.), Landscapes and Seasons of the Medieval World (Toronto 1973)Google Scholar.

16 Rudd, Greenery, 6.

17 Kordecki, L., Ecofeminist Subjectivities: Chaucer’s Talking Birds (New York 2011) 6 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Egan, Green Shakespeare, 3.

19 See, for instance, Jeffreys, E., ‘The Comnenian background to the romans d’antiquité ’, B 48 (1980) 112-31Google Scholar; Ciggaar, K., ‘“Encore une fois”: Chrétien de Troyes et la “matière byzantine”: La révolution des femmes au palais de Constantinople’, Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale (Xe-XIIe siècles) 38.3 (1995) 267-74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jeffreys, E., ‘“The wild beast from the west”: Immediate literary reactions in Byzantium to the Second Crusade’, in The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World, Laiou-Thomadakis, A. and Mottahedeh, R. P. (eds.), (Washington, D.C. 2001) 110-13Google Scholar.

20 For an analysis of the literary structure and stylistic conventions that create the adventure world of two of the romances discussed below, see Beaton, R., From Byzantium to Modern Greece: Medieval Literature and its Modern Reception (Aldershot 2008) chap. 13Google Scholar.

21 Following the definitional parameters of the genre in Beaton, R., The Medieval Greek Romance (London and New York 1996)Google Scholar. A differing set of generic qualifiers can also be found in Agapitos, P. et al., ‘ SO debate: Genre, structure and poetics in the Byzantine vernacular romances of love’, Symbolae Osloenses 79 (2004) 7–101 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which remains one of the most important discussions of the romances. For the works included in (and excluded from) the genre, their dates, a rationale for the generic taxonomy, see Agapitos, ‘SO debate’, 12-26, esp. 12-14. Agapitos excludes The War of Troy, discussed below, on the grounds that ‘no erotic material proper is included’ (Agapitos, ‘SO debate’, 14). In her response to Agapitos’ report, Elizabeth Jeffreys argues for the work’s inclusion on the grounds that it ‘represents one of the first attempts to explore the psychology of erotic love in narrative form in medieval literature’ (Agapitos, ‘SO debate’, 62).

22 Morse, R., Medieval Medea (Cambridge 1996)Google Scholar. The Greek War of Troy is omitted from her analysis, an omission excusable, perhaps, in light of the fact that the first proper edition, Jeffreys, E. and Papathomopoulos, M. (eds.), ‘O Πόλεμος της Τρωάδος I The War of Troy (Athens 1996)Google Scholar, came out the same year as Morse’s own book.

23 Morse, Medieval Medea, xv. Similar readings concerned with gender can be found throughout.

24 Jeffreys and Papathomopoulos, Ό Πόλεμος, 13,1. 273.

25 Translation author’s own.

26 de Sainte-Maure, Benoît. Le Roman de Troie, ed. Constans, L. (Paris 1904) 62,1. 1216Google Scholar.

27 Translation author’s own.

28 Jeffreys and Papathomopoulos, ‘О Πόλεμος, 13.

29 See R. Morse, Medieval Medea, 188-191, for a reading of Guido’s Medea.

30 delle Colonne, Guido, Historia Destructionis Troiae, ed. Griffin, N. (Cambridge, MA 1936) 15 Google Scholar.

31 delle Colonne, Guido, Historia Destructionis Troiae, trans. Meek, M. E. (Bloomington 1974) 14 Google Scholar.

32 Maguire, H. (ed.), Byzantine Magic (Washington, D.C. 1995) 118 Google Scholar.

33 Guido, Historia (1936) 16.

34 Guido, Historia (1974) 14.

35 Guido, Historia (1936) 17.

36 Guido, Historia (1974) 15.

37 Guido, Historia (1936) 17.

38 Guido, Historia (1974) 15.

39 For Lydgate’s treatment of Medea, see Morse, Medieval Medea, 195-98.

40 Lydgate, J., Troy Book, 4 vols, ed. Bergen, Henry (London 1906) vol. 1, p. 74,1.1.2097, and again, with a different formulation at 1.2116.Google Scholar

41 Translation author’s own.

42 There are, in fact, no male magicians in the Palaiologan romances. In Livistros and Rodamni the magician seems at first to be a male merchant ( Betts, G., Three Medieval Greek Romances-.Velthandros and Chrysandza, Kallimacbos and Chrysorroi, Livistros and Rodamni [New York and London 1995] 147 Google Scholar; s1393 in the Greek edition ( Lambert, J. A., Le Roman de Libistros et Rhodamné [Amsterdam 1935])Google Scholar, henceforth L&R, though we find out later that he was actually just following the orders of the witch (Betts, Three Medieval Greek Romances 154; L&R e2848). The type of astrologer/magician described in the romances goes unmentioned in the major work on the subject, Magdalino, P. and Mavroudi, M. (eds.), The Occult Sciences in Byzantium (Geneva 2006)Google Scholar, which focuses mosdy on more learned practitioners of the occult. Greenfield, R., ‘A contribution to the study of Palaeologan magic’, in Maguire, H. (ed.), Byzantine Magic (Washington, D.C. 1995) 117-53,125)Google Scholar.

43 By contrast, see Jeffreys, E., Digenis Akritis: The Grottaferrata and Escorial Versions (Cambridge 1998)Google Scholar, where Digenes’ father the emir, though an Arab, is depicted as white, thus marking his suitability (1.32). For the intersection of race, religion and marriage in Byzantine and Western medieval romances, see also Goldwyn, A., ‘Interfaith marriage in medieval romance’, Diesis 2.1 (2012) 66–78 Google Scholar.

44 L&R, s1612. Betts, Three Medieval Greek Romances, is a translation drawn from the four manuscripts published in Lambert, Le roman de Libistros; thus, I have followed him in putting the letter before the line number to refer to the manuscript in citations. Though the myriad textual problems with the manuscripts of the romances are beyond the scope of the current investigation, a few words on my choice of editions might also be included. A new edition of Kallimachos has been published in Romanzi cavallereschi bizantini: Callimaco e Crisorroe, Beltandro e Crisanza, Storia di Achille, Florio e Plaziaflore, Storia di Apollonio di Tiro, Favola consolatoria sulla Cattiva e la Buona Sorte, a cura di Carolina Cupane. Classici Greci: Autori della tarda antichità e dell’ età bizantina (Torino: Classici UTET, 1995). Two scholarly editions of Livistros have also been published: ΆφήγησιςΛιβίστρου каі Ροδάμνης. Κριτικήεκδοση τηςδιασκευήςα’,μέείσαγωγή, ποφα-ρτήματα каі ενρετήριο λέξεων, ed. Agapitos, P. A., Βυζαντινή και Νεοελληνική Βιβλιοθήκη 9 (Athens: Cultural Foundation of the National Bank [MIET], 2006)Google Scholar and Livistros and Rodamne. The Vatican Version. Critical Edition with Introduction, Commentary and Index-Glossary, ed. Lendari, T., (Athens: Βυζαντινή και Νεοελ-ληνική Βιβλιοθήκη, 2007)Google Scholar. Though Beaton argues that ‘these will not fully supersede’ the Lambert edition (Beaton, From Byzantium to Modern Greece, ch. 13, note 3), a more detailed treatment of the variant manuscript tradition comparing MS V with MS S (part of the ‘A’ tradition published by Agapitos) might allow for an interesting analysis of the variation in these scenes in different versions of the same poem. Because Lambert’s and Pichard’s editions offer good readings of the passages in question, and to make for easier comparison with the English translation in Betts (who also used Lambert and Pichard), I have opted to use these editions here.

45 Betts, Three Medieval Greek Romances, 152.

46 Pichard, M., Le roman de Callimaque et de Chrysorrboé (Paris 1956)Google Scholar, henceforth K&C, 1066.

47 Betts, Three Medieval Greek Romances, 58.

48 K&C, 2578; Betts, Three Medieval Greek Romances, 87.

49 L&R, Sİ633.

50 Betts, Three Medieval Greek Romances, 152.

51 L&R, s1732.

52 Betts, Three Medieval Greek Romances, 154.

53 L&R, s1760.

54 Betts, Three Medieval Greek Romances, 155.

55 L&R, s1765; Betts, Three Medieval Greek Romances, 155.

56 L&R, s2761.

57 Betts, Three Medieval Greek Romances, 175.

58 K&C, 1110.

59 Betts, Three Medieval Greek Romances, 58.

60 K&C, 1170.

61 Betts, Three Medieval Greek Romances, 60.

62 K&C, 2580.

63 Betts, Three Medieval Greek Romances, 87.

64 K&C, 2588.

65 Betts, Three Medieval Greek Romances, 87.

66 L&R, s.2767.

67 Betts, Three Medieval Greek Romances, 175.

68 K&C, 2585.

69 Betts, Three Medieval Greek Romances, 87. The irony of this diction is further enhanced when, five lines later, Kallimachos is ‘τά σί5ηρα λυτρώσας,’ which Betts translates as ‘freed […] from his chains,’ a very different meaning than when applied to the witch, who is freed from life through immolation with the same verb.

70 Barber comes to much the same conclusion, although without using the discourse of ecofeminism, arguing, for instance, that the depiction of the gardens ‘emphasizes the control of man over nature, best represented in man’s control over artistry’ ( Barber, C., ‘Reading the garden in Byzantium: nature and sexuality’, BMGS 16 [1992] 1–19)Google Scholar. A more detailed reading through the prism of ecocriticism may yield yet more insights about the mechanisms of such control.