Call for Submissions: ‘Making for an uncertain future: material ecocritical approaches around the year 1000’ (special issue of Medieval Ecocriticisms), deadline 10 June 2024

This issue of Medieval Ecocriticisms looks at the abundant superfluity (or excess) of the long millennial moment, positioning it in dialogue with the anticipated end of the world in 1000, both anticipatory and hereditary, with all of its forecast systemic, ecological and eschatological collapse. In suggesting this, and in looking at this material through the lens of crisis, time and environment, we find ideas of what it might mean to live in the long end times of a/the ecological long durée of an uncertain future. We invite thoughts around how medieval millennial material, its art and literature might foreshadow the Anthropocene, particularly given how it might, in some way, be responding to the climactic non-apocalypse of 1000 that was forecast, but not realised.

Although there has been some scholarly discomfort around using the past as a tool for discussing later times and paradigms, this issue suggests that the past can be employed as a resource for other ways of thinking about the present and perhaps also the future. Thus, the eschatologically charged period that immediately anticipated the millennium, and the uncertain apotropaism and socio-temporal ‘renaissance’ of the Romanesque, together with their sculpted objects that perform as nodes responding to a network of anticipated crisis, might provide us, as eco-critically thoughtful and materially engaged medievalists, and as a society more broadly, with a critical parallel for thinking about current ecological events.

We ask contributors to think about the ways in which medieval millennial material may:

• Connect or disrupt the medieval and the ‘modern’
• Respond to the here and now, there and then, elsewhere and other-when
• Consist of both deep time and deep history
• React to or disrupt momentary or epochal thinking
• Respond to crisis or an anticipated event that failed to happen or is still unfolding
• Ask where and how we live
• Think about place, environment, and ecology
• Frame relationships between the human and non-human

Papers around 6000 words are sought. Please submit an abstract (300 word maximum) and cv to Meg Boulton (meg.boulton@york.ac.uk) and Meg Bernstein (bernsteinm@alfred.edu).