Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
9-2025
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
English
Advisor
Karl Steel
Committee Members
Steven Kruger
Jonathan Gray
Subject Categories
Literature in English, British Isles | Medieval Studies
Keywords
Medieval, ecocriticism, melancholy, literature
Abstract
This dissertation is grounded in the claim that late medieval literature imagines melancholy not as an individual, isolated experience, but as one that creates a web of relationships between the sufferer, those around them, and the natural world in which they live. Melancholy in a medieval understanding can be both caused and solved by social ties, a disruption which goes hand in hand with melancholy’s humoral association with earth. I examine melancholy’s representation in works from the late Middle Ages, beginning with an exploration of melancholy’s relationship to sociality in the poems St. Erkenwald and Book of the Duchess. I then move on to an exploration of melancholy affects in memento mori poetry, a genre which is usually meant to generate piety and remembrance of one’s fragility but also leaves space for less generative emotions like melancholy. Then, I explore the explicit connection in late medieval literature between writing, bureaucracy, agricultural labor, and melancholy, taking as a case study the poetry of Thomas Hoccleve. In my conclusion, I turn to twenty-first century retellings of medieval stories in order to argue that the connections between nature and melancholy that are highly present in medieval literature are also at play in contemporary writing about the environment, especially the sense that melancholy is both an anti-social emotion and the cause of a system of relationships between human beings and the natural world.
Recommended Citation
Price, Emily A., "“Earth Took of Earth”: Melancholy and Earth in Late Medieval English Literature" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6392
