Session1137
TitleImagining the Edge: Negotiating Ecofacts and Fictions of the Middle Ages
Date/TimeWednesday 6 July 2022: 11.15-12.45
 
SponsorMedieval Ecocriticisms
 
OrganiserMichael Bintley, Department of English, Theatre & Creative Writing, Birkbeck, University of London
 
Moderator/ChairKathryn Franklin, Department of History, Classics & Archaeology, Birkbeck, University of London
 
Paper 1137-a With 'hawthorn hegis knet': Corresponding with Hedgerows in Late Medieval Writings
(Language: English)
Anke Bernau, School of Arts, Languages & Cultures, University of Manchester
Index Terms: Geography and Settlement Studies; Language and Literature - Middle English; Learning (The Classical Inheritance); Science
Paper 1137-b Traversing the Borderlands of Body and World in Old English Boundary Clauses
(Language: English)
Abigail Bleach, School of Arts, Languages & Cultures, University of Manchester
Index Terms: Charters and Diplomatics; Geography and Settlement Studies; Language and Literature - Old English
Paper 1137-c Frontier Justice: Mapping the Borders of the Extended Mind in Early English Texts and Landscapes
(Language: English)
Michael Bintley, Department of English, Theatre & Creative Writing, Birkbeck, University of London
Index Terms: Archaeology - General; Geography and Settlement Studies; Language and Literature - Old English
 
AbstractThis panel investigates the imagined edges of landscapes and relationships between material and conceptual boundaries. Bernau considers hedgerows in late medieval encyclopaedias and poetry, showing how they can be thought of as 'ecofacts', and how the hedgerow, as 'living heritage', contributes to conceptions of time and materiality. Exploring Old English charter bounds through the 'border stepper', Bleach considers how these reimagined borderlands manifest ecological entanglement, as interfaces between human and nonhuman, body, and world. Bintley addresses borders as sites of negotiation and conflict, considering textual, and material sources of evidence from early medieval England as components of an 'extended mind'.