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INTERVENTIONS: NEW STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL CULTURE Ethan Knapp, Series Editor All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. The Politics of Ecology LAND, LIFE, AND L AW IN MEDIEVAL BRITAIN EDITED BY Randy P. Schiff and Joseph Taylor THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS COLUMBUS All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. Copyright © 2016 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The politics of ecology : land, life, and law in medieval Britain / edited by Randy P. Schiff and Joseph Taylor. pages cm. — (Interventions: new studies in medieval culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8142-1295-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8142-1295-6 (cloth : alk. pa- per) — 1. Literature, Medieval—History and criticism. 2. Political ecology—England. 3. Bio- politics—England. 4. Law, Medieval. I. Schiff, Randy P., 1972– editor. II. Taylor, Joseph, 1977– editor. III. Series: Interventions (Columbus, Ohio) PN671.P65 2015 809'.89410902—dc23 2015030905 Cover design by Christian Fuenfhausen Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in ITC Galliard Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. Contents List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction The Politics of Ecology: Land, Life, and Law in Medieval Britain RANDY P. SCHIFF AND JOSEPH TAYLOR 1 Part I • Biopolitics and Forest Law 1 Biopolitics in the Forest KARL STEEL 33 2 Sovereign Meat: Reassembling the Hunter King from Medieval Forest Law to The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle JEANNE PROVOST 56 3 The Physician and the Forester: Virginia, Venison, and the Biopolitics of Vital Property RANDY P. SCHIFF 82 Part II • Objects, Networks, and Land 4 On the Line of the Law: The London Skinners and the Biopolitics of Fur MICHELLE R. WARREN 107 All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. vi Contents 5 Saintly Ecologies: Tracing Collectivities in the Life of King Oswald of Northumbria MARY KATE HURLEY 127 6 Undeadness and the Tree of Life: The Ecological Thought of Sovereignty KATHLEEN BIDDICK 151 Part III • Politics, Affect, and Life 7 Sovereign Ecologies: Managing the King’s Bodies in Anglo-Norman Historiography JOSEPH TAYLOR 179 8 Radical Conservation and the Eco-logy of Late Medieval Political Complaint STEPHANIE L. BATKIE 210 9 Lost Geographies, Remembrance, and The Awntyrs off Arthure KATHLEEN COYNE KELLY 232 Bibliography 267 List of Contributors 293 Index 295 All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. Illustrations Chapter 6 FIGURE 6.1 Robert Smithson, Dead Tree (1969) 153 FIGURE 6.2 Anselm Kiefer, Palmsonntag [Palm Sunday] (2007) 153 FIGURE 6.3 Jessica Chastaine in Tree of Life (Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2011) 155 FIGURE 6.4 Excavation at Seahenge, Norfolk, UK (1998) 158 FIGURE 6.5 Ruthwell Cross, South Face 162 FIGURE 6.6 The Cloisters Cross, 12th century, front 169 FIGURE 6.7 The Cloisters Cross, 12th century, back 169 Chapter 9 FIGURE 9.1 High Hesket, Armathwaite, Cumbria 252 FIGURE 9.2 Detail, The Gough Map, Tern [or the] Wathelan and Foresta de Inglewode (1350–60) 253 FIGURE 9.3 Detail, Poly-Olbion (1622) 255 FIGURE 9.4 Detail, Westmorland and Cumberland (1695) 255 FIGURE 9.5 Detail, Ordnance Survey (1861; 1898–99) 257 FIGURE 9.6 Tarn Wadling, as seen by geologists 260 • vii • All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. Acknowledgments THE EDITORS would like to thank The Ohio State University Press and, specifically, editor Eugene O’Connor for his vigilance and forth- rightness in helping us bring this volume to press. We are grateful to series editor Ethan Knapp and to former director Malcolm Litchfield for their labor and encouragement in this endeavor. The anonymous reader for Ohio State and George Edmondson made numerous helpful sug- gestions to improve the individual essays within the collection as well as the project’s larger arguments. We, of course, must thank each of our contributors, whose critical work we have had the pleasure of editing. We would also like to acknowledge Elizabeth Scala for helpful sugges- tions in the volume’s early stages and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, both for useful early comments and for the opportunity to offer two sessions related to the volume’s arguments in his “Ecologies” thread at the 2012 New Chaucer Society Congress in Portland, Oregon. We are grateful for funds provided by the University of Alabama in Huntsville’s Humanities Center that contributed to the production of this book and to friends and colleagues who have proffered compelling discussions that further enhanced our thinking about its topics. We would like to offer thanks to Eileen Joy and Punctum Books for permission to publish Kathleen Bid- dick’s essay in our volume. Her work originally appeared in her book, Make and Let Die: Untimely Sovereignties (Brooklyn: Punctum Books, 2015). Finally, we would like to thank our families for their love and sup- port in pursuit of this collection’s completion, especially Maki Becker, Duncan and Desmond Schiff, and Laura, Ellie and Annabel Taylor. • ix • All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. Introduction The Politics of Ecology LAND, LIFE, AND LAW IN MEDIEVAL BRITAIN Randy P. Schiff and Joseph Taylor IF MEDIEVAL literary studies is, like so many fields, currently condi- tioned by an ecological turn that dislodges the human from its central place in materialist analysis, then why now focus on the law? Is not the law the most human, if not indeed the human, institution? In proposing that all life in medieval Britain, whether animal or vegetable, was subject to the same legal machine that enabled all claims on land, are we not ignoring the ecocritical demand that we counteract human exception- alism and reframe the past with inhuman eyes? The Politics of Ecology answers these questions by infusing biopolitical material and theory into ecocentric studies of medieval life. Understanding the biological and the legal as mutually constituted, a biopolitical ecocriticism avoids an uncriti- cal anthropocentrism by insisting that all biological entities precede, pass through, and are conditioned by law. Responding to recent expansions of ecocriticism, as well as to work in the related fields of animal studies and object-oriented ontology, this collection enters into current ecotheo- retical conversations by exploring the literary and political entanglements produced by the triple helix of land, life, and law. Our focus on law, despite appearances, does not privilege the human end of the Cartesian divide; rather, it exposes the fallacy of such bina- ries. Providing an especially capacious model of the ecological, Timothy • 1 • All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. 2 Introduction, Schiff and Taylor Morton explores what he calls the “mesh,” which figures the boundless, borderless interconnection of all material entities that a new ecological thought must begin to envision and analyze.1 Yet, life in this mesh— whether animal, vegetable, or indeed inorganic—is not completely unmoored from the realities of the Symbolic—or at least not yet! This is not to say that law always bounds and restricts life in the medieval mesh but that legality is part of its very fabric. In medieval Britain, law pervades numerous life-networks in vast and complex ways for which ecocriticism cannot solely account. For this reason, we suggest a her- meneutic that explores the enmeshed relations of all biological life. If Thomas Lemke rightly reads biopolitical inquiry as insistent on dispel- ling the illusion that humans are essentially “free beings” whose char- acteristics are due to being socialized rather than being “in large part biologically conditioned,”2 then a biopolitical lens helps expose the co- constitution of the legal and the biological in an acutely law-saturated medieval West. The fundamental interpenetration of land, life, and law can be seen with special clarity in notions of the medieval forest. For no other field of literary study does the forest have as fraught and—for biopolitical analy- sis—as illuminating a cultural significance than for the Western Middle Ages. The medieval forest is simultaneously a space of absolute law and its seeming opposite—utter wildness. The Middle English Dictionary highlights these two primary, yet paradoxical meanings in its first two definitions of “forest.” Definition 1a in the MED, understanding the for- est as “a large tract of uninhabited, or sparsely inhabited, woodland; a wilderness,” brings us, in terms of literary life, within the wild spaces into which errant knights or exiled maidens slip off as they leave the civilized court spaces of romance. Definition 2a in the MED, according to which the forest is “a wooded tract belonging to a ruler, set apart for hunt- ing; a royal forest” or “a wood enclosed by walls; a park,” places us fully within an artificially constructed, legal space.3 The interpenetration of these two seemingly opposite views of sylvan space—simultaneously wild woods and highly regulated forest—plays a central role in medieval West- ern ecohistory. What is more, the duality of the term “forest” in medi- 1. For Timothy Morton’s influential image of the mesh as a means of imagining the interconnected nature of all things, see The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 28–38.