Prof. Carla María Thomas Publishes Review in Modern Philology

Congratulations to Prof. Carla María Thomas on publication of a new book review (online ahead-of-print) at Modern Philology. In volume 120, number 2, Prof. Thomas reviews Old English Ecotheology: The Exeter Book by Courtney Barajas.

As Courtney Catherine Barajas points out from the beginning, “We live in a period of acute environmental crisis,” which makes her argument for an Old English ecotheology in the following pages all the more poignant (11). She contends that an early medieval English ecotheology—a synthesis of theology and ecocritical theory that “examines the relationship between religious worldviews and the degradation or restoration of the environment”—is evident through a close engagement with the “microcosm of Old English poetry” that the Exeter Book represents (20). First, Barajas locates such an ecotheology in the religious prose of the two most prolific homilists of the period, Ælfric of Eynsham (d. 1010) and Wulfstan, archbishop of York (d. 1023). Then, she convincingly demonstrates the role that Old English poetry had in articulating an “early medieval English earth consciousness,” which “anticipates by nearly a millennium [Norman C.] Habel’s identification of a ‘new earth consciousness’” in various poems throughout the collection (15). [ . . . ]

Read more of Thomas's review at Modern Philology.