The essays in this issue, edited by Denva Gallant and Amelia Hope-Jones, explore the diverse ways in which eremitic bodies, ascetic practice, and the landscape of the wilderness were represented and imagined in medieval visual culture. The issue also engages with urgent contemporary concerns about the impact of human activity on the earth that sustains us and resonates with recent scholarly interest in the relationship between humanity and nature in the pre- and early modern period.

https://doi.org/10.61302/LVOO9970

Contents

Denva Gallant and Amelia Hope-Jones, Introduction to Environmental Narratives and the Eremitic Turn

John Renner, Independent Scholar, Between the Mountain and the City: Eremitical Life and Death in the Camposanto, Pisa

Cathleen Hoeniger, Queen’s University, Reading the Landscape in the Camposanto Thebaid

Denva Gallant, Rice University, Memoria and the Spiritual Journey in the Thebaid Cycle at Santa Marta in Siena

Julia Perratore, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Waters of Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert

Dustin Aaron, Rhode Island School of Design, Hermits, Holy Sepulchers, and the Limits of Wilderness at the Externsteine

Alexandra Dodson, Notre Dame of Maryland University, From Mount Carmel to the Comune: The Eremitical Life in Carmelite Legislation

Sarah S. Wilkins, Pratt Institute, “I Am That Woman:” Creating the Eremitical Magdalen Dwelling in the Wilderness of Provence

Rebekah Compton, College of Charleston, Forest Ecology: The Silver Fir Trees of Camaldoli in Fra Filippo Lippi’s Uffizi and Berlin Adoration of the Child paintings

Sara Varanese, Rutgers University, Elephants, Yogis, and Kings: Ritual and Ecology in a Seventh-Century Forest Hermitage in Eastern India

Amelia Hope-Jones, University of Edinburgh, Friendship as an (eremitic) way of life (forthcoming)