Return to search

The Impact of Climate Change on Late Medieval English Culture

This MA thesis scrutinizes metaphors used by the late medieval English in order to explore the cultural response to climate anomalies of varying severity prefacing the Little Ice Age. The thesis indicates that changes in these cultural expressions marked a transformation in late medieval English writers' conceptions of the natural world and their relationship to it. The central hypothesis is that repeated, long-term unreliable and uncertain weather conditions, and the resulting material insecurities and losses, stimulated a fundamental cultural response which reconfigured the metaphors used for the natural world. Although the representation of nature is inescapably an act of imagination, metaphors and metonymies for nature will be identified in the medieval creative literature, as well as the proto-scientific study of weather, and, in the context of the socioeconomic metabolism model, be brought under the light of conceptual metaphor analysis for elucidation.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:OTU.1807/25909
Date13 January 2011
CreatorsRowlatt, Linnéa Shekinah
ContributorsHoffmann, Richard
Source SetsLibrary and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada
Languageen_ca
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis

Page generated in 0.0021 seconds