Eleanor Johnson

"In May of 2022, Columbia University's Dr. Eleanor Johnson watched along with her students as the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade. At the same time, her class was studying the 1968 horror film Rosemary's Baby and Johnson had a sudden epiphany: horror cinema engages directly with the combustive politics of women's rights and offer a light through the darkness and an outlet to scream. With a voice as persuasive as it is insightful, Johnson reveals how classics like Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, and The Shining expose and critique issues of reproductive control, domestic violence, and patriarchal oppression. Scream with Me weaves these iconic films into the fabric of American feminism, revealing that true horror often lies not in the supernatural, but in the familiar confines of the home, exposing the deep-seated fears and realities of women's lives. While on the one hand a joyful celebration of seminal and beloved horror films, Scream with Me is also an unflinching and timely recognition of the power of this genre to shape and reflect cultural dialogues about gender and power"-- Provided by publisher.

Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism (1968-1980)

Scream with Me

"Eleanor Johnson corrects some commonly held (mis)assumptions concerning what the average medieval English person might've thought about what we now call the natural environment or the ecosystem. Reading both well-studied fourteenth- and fifteenth-century works (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and the Canterbury Tales), and lesser-known ones (Winner and Waster and Mum and the Sothsegger), as well as legal and municipal documents, sermons, moral and penitential tracts, practical and medical guides, plague narratives, and historical chronicles from the period, Johnson describes how poets used the resources of poetic language-meter, rhyme, alliteration, metaphor, simile, personification, characterization, plot, dramatic staging, repetition, and other literary devices-to think and feel their way into the problems of ecological peril, even though they lacked the science and scientific vocabulary we have today. Johnson explores how these writers combined multiple discourses from their particular, if narrow, vantage point to comment on ecological disasters, inventing their own "ecosystemic" language and commentary. As Johnson reminds us, the English Middle Ages had their share of environmental problems-air pollution, soil depletion, deforestation, Little Ice Ages, famines, and plagues-similar to the ones we face in the twenty-first century. Focusing on the word "waste" in its original usage across various texts, ranging from the literary to the legal, from the theological to the psychological, Johnson puts twenty-first-century concerned citizens in touch with kindred spirits in medieval England, fully aware of-and interested in-how human (mis)behavior might be connected to the natural world; how resource allocation, use, and pollution by one person might affect another; how environmental damage was linked to urbanization; and how one person's choices might affect the next generation. The book will be read primarily by those interested in medieval English literature, medieval historians, and literary scholars working in later periods, but Johnson also invites conversation with anyone working more broadly in the environmental humanities today"--

Poetry and Ecosystemic Thought in Medieval England

Waste and the Wasters

Examines the humble thimble and its many varieties, from the simple workaday type to the rarer and more exquisite examples that gave scope for artists and craftsmen. This work gives an introduction to the possibilities that exist, including the parallel subject of thimble cases.

Thimbles and Thimble Cases

Poems

The Dwell

What does it mean to contemplate? In the Middle Ages, more than merely thinking with intensity, it was a religious practice entailing utter receptiveness to the divine presence. Contemplation is widely considered by scholars today to have been the highest form of devotional prayer, a rarified means of experiencing God practiced only by the most devout of monks, nuns, and mystics. Yet, in this groundbreaking new book, Eleanor Johnson argues instead for the pervasiveness and accessibility of contemplative works to medieval audiences. By drawing together ostensibly diverse literary genres—devotional prose, allegorical poetry, cycle dramas, and morality plays—Staging Contemplation paints late Middle English contemplative writing as a broad genre that operated collectively and experientially as much as through radical individual disengagement from the world. Johnson further argues that the contemplative genre played a crucial role in the exploration of the English vernacular as a literary and theological language in the fifteenth century, tracing how these works engaged modes of disfluency—from strained syntax and aberrant grammar, to puns, slang, code-switching, and laughter—to explore the limits, norms, and potential of English as a devotional language. Full of virtuoso close readings, this book demonstrates a sustained interest in how poetic language can foster a participatory experience of likeness to God among lay and devotional audiences alike.

Eleanor Johnson

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