A Fourteenth-Century Ecology: “The Former Age” With Dindimus

Abstract

“ T he Former Age” originates in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy , Book II, Meter 5, which praises the first, peaceful humans, who shared what little they had communally. The traditional theme, and Chaucer’s use of this material to condemn mills, the wool-dying industry, overseas trade, tyranny, and sedition—all the disorder of a world that had lost its original perfection—warrant the source studies and historical criticism of the poem’s scholarship so far.1 But by praising a vegetarian people who injure nothing, not even the soil or sea, “The Former Age” critiques not only human institutions but also, more radically, the human itself. This chapter reads “The Former Age” as one of a set of late-medieval antihumanist works about people indifferent to the hierarchical distinction between humans and nonhuman animals and even between humans and the world more generally. These works not only advocate what might be recognized as ecological thinking, but also directly envision what humans would lose if they abandoned their supremacy. None of these works, then, are simply utopian imaginations of humans just “getting along with” nonhumans and the world as a whole, but rather are unflinching accounts of the misery humans would experience if they sought to harm nothing. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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