'Schyre Leuez' And Cesspits: An Ecocritical Reading Of Land Use And Apocalypse In Cleanness

Abstract

This thesis examines land use and apocalypse in Cleanness in order to investigate how land use participates in the construction of medieval social and political systems and how the apocalyptic destruction the land acts out functions to make us question the primacy of the human in medieval thought. While some critics have discussed land use in the Pearl-Poet's works, they often discuss land in allegorical religious terms or in theories of space and place, rarely investigating the land's vital role in the construction of social and political order or its role in the preservation or destruction of mankind. This thesis will seek to fill this gap by providing an ecocritical reading that will focus primarily on Cleanness with a view to investigate two themes: the physical transformation of the land (presented as apocalyptic changes in Cleanness) and the human characters' interactions with the land (particularly as regards husbandry and its association with purity; an association that the land reflects as well). Land use and apocalypse are the main environmental themes in the poem, and can also be extended to the other poems in the Pearl manuscript. Focusing on these relationships, particularly in Cleanness, will allow me to address the ways that land acts as material representation of medieval social and political hierarchies and concerns.