Ithaca College

On February 9, Michael Twomey (English/Dana Professor of Humanities and Arts, retired) presented a paper at the 24th annual conference of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (Arizona State University, Tempe).  The theme of the conference was “Reading the Natural World:  Perceptions of the Environment and Ecology During the Global Middle Ages and Renaissance.” 

Twomey’s paper, “The Exemplary Environment: Isidorean Paradigms of Nature in Medieval English Encyclopedias,” examined the representation of the natural world in a group of four medieval encyclopedias based on the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (published in Spain in 636), a basic text in medieval education.  Like the Etymologies, these encyclopedias— all but one of them written by English scholars for their students—focused on the environments of the Mediterranean and Middle East, privileging the flora, fauna, and landscapes of ancient Rome and the Bible and largely ignoring the world outside their readers’ doors in England.  They encouraged thinking of nature as “exemplary environments”—places of mental habitation that rendered nature as a system of signs pointing to spiritual realities possessing more cultural significance than the physical world that inspired them.  Because they ignored whatever significance nature has in and of itself, they neither expressed nor implied any ethical or theological position about nature’s intrinsic worth.  In so doing, Isidorean encyclopedias are key examples of the ideological steps by which the West has arrived at the present environmental crisis.

The paper, which picks up on ecocritical issues about which Twomey has published and lectured for the past several years, will appear in a volume of conference proceedings to be published in 2019