An Ecocritical Reading of the Great Storm Presented in Aldhelm’s Carmen rhythmicum Set Along the Devon/Dorset Coast:An Insight Into the Wider Environmental Damage Affected Across Southern Britain in the Later Seventh Century

作     者：Katherine Barker 

作者机构：Society of Antiquaries of LondonBurlington HouseLondon Bournemouth UniversityBournemouthEngland 

出 版 物：《Cultural and Religious Studies》 (文化与宗教研究（英文版）)

年 卷 期：2021年第9卷第8期

页      面：349-364页

学科分类：07[理学] 0707[理学-海洋科学] 

主　　题：Anglo-Saxon England St Aldhelm Storms Plague Counties Boundaries 

摘      要：In the closing decades of the seventh century,Aldhelm of Malmesbury,first West Saxon Bishop of Sherborne,composed a lengthy,200 line poetic work known as the Carmen rhythmicum which takes as its focus a dramatic *** earliest storms recorded present within a few decades of the invention of the barometer and,as Hubert Lamb notes in his Historic Storms of the North Sea,British Isles and Northwest Europe,“circumspection is needed in accepting reports based on those of early observers.Aldhelm’s poetic Carmen provides a powerful element of“meteorological corroborationhere in its historico-geographical setting along the Dumnonian/Devonshire border.A length of Devon/Dorset coastline which today forms part of the Jurassic Coast inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2001;a coastline,notes the website“subject to severe weather conditions at times…violent storms occurred in 1824 and 1974…these and various lesser storms have battered the cliffs and caused flooding…an eroding landscape.This paper takes as its subject,Aldhelm’s vivid description of a severe storm,he experienced along this coastline over 1,300 years ago and which he *** here is a first-ever reading of the environmental impact alluded to and to its long-term legacy across the southern Britain of the later seventh *** length of time,Aldhelm declares it had taken him to compose this work,enhances both its bardic,legal connotation and his description of the damage effected by this tempestas,this hurricane-force wind,following its“blowing over;a tempestas,we also read here as alluding to an outbreak of plague.