The Postmedieval “Earth a wandering”: Northern Appalachia and Orthodox Christian Cosmology

Photo: Penns Creek

About 10 years ago I had an article entitled “Earth: A wandering” published in postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, a publication that grew from a then-innovative trend in U.S. medieval studies, adapting postmodern theory to premodern works of literature. Its center was a community that emerged from the International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo, MI. This trend was in many ways inspired and curated by a friend and colleague, Prof. Jeffrey Cohen, now Dean of Humanities at Arizona State University, at the time a professor of English at George Washington University, and a booster of my first book, Strange Beauty: Ecocritical Approaches to Early Medieval Literature. The article “Earth: A Wandering” reflects my work in that period, and that movement in American medieval studies, although as an Orthodox Christian scholar I was working with a somewhat different emphasis, considering how traditional and mystical aspects of early Christian thought might be explainable in postmodern terms. Among other colleagues, I also got to know Dr. Gaelan Gilbert in that effort, who is now Father Anthony in the Orthodox Church. I offer this copy of my article here as an artifact from that period in my work in environmental humanities, with also a caveat that from an Orthodox standpoint the quotation in it from Philip Sherrard should be weighed with the critique of Sophianism found in the writings of St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco.

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