"There is a deep beauty in the way Gayk unwraps . . . the tensions and imperfections of our engagement with the environment, both then and now."
— Times Literary Supplement
"Powerfully penned and richly researched . . . Gayk's [Apocalyptic Ecologies] strikingly shows how attention to medieval attention to both the wonders and terrors of the natural world can deepen our sense of engagement with both the environment and literature focused thereon."
— Journal of English and Germanic Philology,
“Apocalyptic Ecologies is a work of care. Worlds sit within worlds: sometimes we are with the Pearl poet wondering how families fleeing flood can be drowned in terror, at others we are following the author as she follows a child through the Indiana woods and teaches accidental lessons about arboreal flourishing in what had seemed death. The book unwinds medieval possibility generously--which is to say, with full acknowledgment of the grim and the joyful, of the worst that unfolds and the best. That attention which is curiosity which is care which is love saturates the world that the author conveys in the beloved woods near to home, and the world that she invites readers to make possible as well.”
— The Medieval Review
"Throughout its careful studies of how writers reshaped biblical narratives, Apocalyptic Ecologies challenges the received idea of medieval Christianity as overwhelmingly anthropocentric . . . Apocalyptic Ecologies is fundamentally a work of medieval literary
criticism, emerging from its author’s deep knowledge of premodern Christian thought. However, it offers several points of access for the general reader, including summaries of historical events and literary conventions."
— ISLE
"Gayk stages an encounter between the endangered landscapes of the present and the disasters of Middle English literature to consider how impending doom can open new possibilities for relating to the world. The result is a uniquely affecting and persuasive methodological experiment, which brings together attentive formalism, historicist accounts of the medieval environment, and personal essays to seek new ways to cope with catastrophe across multiple scales, from the local to the cosmic. . . . Apocalyptic Ecologies is a haunting book, in the best sense of the word. It calls us to rethink what it means to read, write, and teach at a time of catastrophe and casts the love of language and love of creation as twinned aspects of committing to a dying world."
— Review of English Studies
"The author's enterprise and originality are praiseworthy . . . [Apocalyptic Ecologies] has something to say and enables others to say more, and for that reason alone deserves special notice."
— Mediaevistik
"In this sensitive and searching new book, Shannon Gayk examines medieval English poems, plays, and sermons that draw on sacred history to understand the causes and consequences of such disasters, reimagining biblical stories in response to environmental catastrophes real and imagined. . . . Gayk combines research and analysis with reflections on the environments that have shaped her life, to produce a work of nuanced scholarship that is also a timely personal meditation on how we can think through apocalypses past, present, and future."
— Comitatus
“Apocalyptic Ecologies is a confident, well-argued, and intellectually stimulating volume. It offers a solid platform through which to advocate the importance of medieval literature in wider ecocritical conversations. It successfully demonstrates how medieval depictions of the environment, good and bad, can help reframe our own fraught relationship with the natural world.”
— Medium Aevum
“The way Gayk involves her personal upbringing to understand the idea of apocalyptic ecologies makes this book have a meditative quality, which invites readers to tap into their own experience. Indeed, a wonderful work.”
— Muhammad Adiz Wasisto, University of Vienna, Religious Studies Review
"A study that is both deeply personal and also a master class in the close reading of a wide swath of late medieval English literature. As such, this volume occupies that rare place where few scholarly studies ever reach: a valuable contribution to the field that can also be read with profit and enjoyment by a general audience."
— Choice
“At once intimate and historically far-ranging, Apocalyptic Ecologies is a lyrical meditation on how societies grapple with the effects of natural disaster. Beautifully written, it makes the compelling case that medieval writers offer us not just a pageant of weather disasters drawn from the Old and New Testaments but instead provide modern readers with urgently needed models of ecological connection and environmental stewardship.”
— Kellie Robertson, University of Maryland
“Apocalyptic Ecologies will be a transformative book in premodern studies and across the environmental humanities. With eloquence and great erudition, Gayk traces the apocalyptic edges of medieval ecological imaginings, revealing vital new perspectives on a world that thought about its own end times in ways that haunt us still. A moving and powerful book.”
— Bruce Holsinger, University of Virginia
“Apocalyptic Ecologies offers an illuminating account of environmental thinking in premodern vernacular literature. Through beautiful readings of medieval plays and poetry, punctuated with moving reflections on her own experiences of flux in the twenty-first century, Gayk opens up medieval literature as a source of both comfort and challenge to contemporary readers living through what often seem to be the end days.”
— Jessica Brantley, Yale University
