On Estes, Heide. Anglo-Saxon Literary Landscapes: Ecotheory and the Environmental Imagination. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2017

While literary scholars traditionally understood landscapes as metaphors, this recent book (recommended to me due to Estes’ status as the most prolific, and one of the earlier medieval scholars to work on ecocriticism) accepts the natural world as a place. Estes writes that while “animal studies does not always overlap with broader environmental concerns” her “chapter focuses on how depictions of animals and humans interact in medieval texts, and attempts to locate those interactions within broader environmental questions” (119). Estes explores how people interacted with/conceived their environment in a chapter on “Animal Natures” (containing sections on Eating Animals As Cultural Norm, Animals, Humans, and Reason, Animal Aesthetics and Agency), as well as other chapters’ sections including Beowulf and the Sea-Creatures, Ecofeminism and the Other, and Decentering the Human. For Estes, Anglo-Saxon ideologies of animals as opposed to humans and destined for human use, are embedded (sedimented) in our culture. I understand this to be in conversation with Sara Ahmed’s idea of race as sedimented history. Estes links “the idea of the hyperobject” to “social structures such as racism and sexism” and to poetry and prose medieval works that “take animals … for granted as materials for human consumption” (119).