Date Presented

Spring 4-2026

Document Type

Thesis

First Advisor

Dr. Aubrey Plourde

Second Advisor

Dr. Elizabeth Sharrett

Third Advisor

Dr. Elza Tiner

Abstract

During the Middle Ages, humans and the weather were believed to have an inherently adversarial relationship. Understanding how people operate within the natural world is a difficult topic, and this especially holds true for a time that lacked modern scientific knowledge. While there is greater appreciation for how the weather is formed today, understanding of the weather during the medieval period was largely superstitious, especially during the early medieval period when pagan and Christian beliefs towards the environment began to overlap. According to Gillian Rudd’s essay “Being Green In Late Medieval English Literature” found within The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism by Greg Garrard, Paganism viewed the natural world as an “other” (36). Meanwhile, Christianity was also emerging during this time, with differing viewpoints towards the weather than Paganism. Mostly, Christianity saw the weather as a tool for the divine, with Steven Epstein stating that “Medieval people also discovered in Nature ample reasons to fear it as occasionally the agent of divine wrath,” (151). The resulting combination of these two religions created an understanding of the weather as an oppositional force to humanity. People were distant from nature, and they were also directly impacted by it. These beliefs also influenced how medieval people viewed their agency within the natural world. Humans cannot prevent the catastrophic effects of bad weather, resulting in a feeling of powerlessness. Medieval people were at a point in time when they were attempting to understand themselves in relation to the natural world. On this matter, ecocritical scholar Serenella Iovino states that “to talk of human agency alone is an abstraction, because actions, as well as stories and all formative patterns – whether social, natural, or technological – are always “intra-active” compositions in which humans encounter (or collide with) the nonhuman forces, phenomena, and “things” that share with them the stage of space and time” (76). All people share their place in the world with nature. For medieval people, they were sharing their space with a force that they did not understand scientifically, and which was actively threatening their survival. Their attempts to comprehend their amount of agency in the natural world had to be interactive. This led them to rely on religion to make sense of another force that they shared space with on earth. These beliefs were largely influenced by the everyday lives of medieval people. A society that performed a majority of manual labor outdoors had entire days dictated by changes in the weather. Furthermore, with their lack of modern weather prediction technology, people could not prepare to protect themselves. While they did lack many of the scientific advancements that the modern day uses to predict the weather, the people of the Middle Ages did want to control their responses, with Steven Epstein stating that “In theory, reasonable precautions could limit the damage from fires, but most natural disasters, like earthquakes, simply happened and even the most prudent people could do nothing to predict or prevent them” (172). These responses reveal an attempt to understand and prepare for a force that had control over their society, even if they could not predict the arrival of storms and other weather events. While medieval people were viewing the weather through a religious lens, this interpretation broadly generalizes the full understandings that these people developed. John Aberth elaborates on this topic by stating that “medieval exploiters of nature traced their lineage back to the Hebrew tradition of the Old Testament, which had placed man at the center of a God-created universe and where progress was measured in terms of humans’ divinely ordained dominance and control over his surroundings” (24). This interpretation states that medieval people found it easy to exploit the natural world, because they saw themselves as the center of the universe. Therefore, because they were mainly created in God’s image, the rest of the natural world revolved around them. However, as Aberth explains, these are stereotypical views of the Middle Ages that fail to account for Pagan influences (25). As previously mentioned, the combination of Christianity and Paganism created the idea of nature that was entirely “othered” from humanity. Due to this, medieval people instead viewed the weather as a force that exerted control over them. People during the Middle Ages were attempting to understand why the weather was a force that maintained overwhelming control over their lives. Examining representations of the weather in literary texts helps to understand some of their thinking. The Exeter Book’s The Wanderer and Thomas of England’s courtly romance Tristran and Isolt both depict the weather as a force with control over humanity. While the weather’s interventions in these texts contrast in significant ways, the protagonists have their lives significantly altered by the influence of the weather. In both texts, the weather is anthropomorphized to emphasize the lack of agency that people have against the control of the weather. Humanizing the weather in this way puts humanity at the center of environmental interpretations. Within both The Wanderer and Tristran and Isolt, the characters are used to examine human agency within the environment. In The Wanderer, the wanderer believes that the weather is sent from God to help him understand the nature of his exile. He laments the loss of his society and friends, holding a sense of longing for a community that has cast him out. The characters in Tristran and Isolt directly address God when the weather acts as a barrier, believing that He controls the weather. When Tristran is first kidnapped as a child, the weather acts as a barrier that prevents pirates from taking him to Norway. Later, the weather also acts as a barrier that stops Isolt from reaching Tristran before his death. While Isolt is traveling, a storm puts her journey in jeopardy, but eventually it disperses. Despite this, the wind also completely stops its movement on the ocean, preventing her from traveling to Tristran. Isolt is married to King Mark, but she is attempting to maintain a relationship with Tristran. The storm implies that Isolt is committing a sin by cheating on King Mark with Tristran. Conveniently, the wind starts to blow again once Tristran has died, allowing Isolt to reach the land and discover her dead lover. Both texts use the weather as a method for exploring the lack of human agency within the natural world, yet it also shows a power struggle between the two as people are desperate to maintain their free will. At first, these depictions may seem centered on humanity, but granting the environment divine power gives it control over people. Instead of centering humans or the environment in their representations of the weather, these texts prioritize both in order to comprehend the struggle for human agency within the natural world and, by extension, their relationship with the divine.

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