Bill and Kelly Owen, two brothers who came up in the hardscrabble country of San Saba County, Texas, during the 1920s and 1930s, built one of the most successful cattle and sheep operations in the state, despite the devastating drought of the 1950s. Along the way, they figured out how to help not only themselves, but others in their home town. This brief biography by their daughters, Martha Owen Burnham and Eleanor Owen Johnson, tells their inspiring story of hard work, fair trading, creativity, and determination.

Literary scholars often avoid the category of the aesthetic in discussions of ethics, believing that purely aesthetic judgments can vitiate analyses of a literary work's sociopolitical heft and meaning. In Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages, Eleanor Johnson reveals that aesthetics the formal aspects of literary language that make it sense-perceptible are indeed inextricable from ethics in the writing of medieval literature. Johnson brings a keen formalist eye to bear on the prosimetric form: the mixing of prose with lyrical poetry. This form descends from the writings of the sixth-century Christian philosopher Boethius specifically his famous prison text, Consolation of Philosophy to the late medieval English tradition. Johnson argues that Boethius's text had a broad influence not simply on the thematic and philosophical content of subsequent literary writing, but also on the specific aesthetic construction of several vernacular traditions. She demonstrates the underlying prosimetric structures in a variety of Middle English texts including Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and portions of the Canterbury Tales, Thomas Usk's Testament of Love, John Gower's Confessio amantis, and Thomas Hoccleve's autobiographical poetry and asks how particular formal choices work, how they resonate with medieval literary-theoretical ideas, and how particular poems and prose works mediate the tricky business of modeling ethical transformation for a readership.

A groundbreaking examination of ecological thought in medieval England. While the scale of today’s crisis is unprecedented, environmental catastrophe is nothing new. Waste and the Wasters studies the late Middle Ages, when a convergent crisis of land contraction, soil depletion, climate change, pollution, and plague eclipsed Western Europe. In a culture lacking formal scientific methods, the task of explaining and coming to grips with what was happening fell to medieval poets. The poems they wrote used the terms “waste” or “wasters” to anchor trenchant critiques of people’s unsustainable relationships with the world around them and with each other. In this book, Eleanor Johnson shows how poetry helped medieval people understand and navigate the ecosystemic crises—both material and spiritual—of their time.

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.

A groundbreaking examination of ecological thought in medieval England. While the scale of today’s crisis is unprecedented, environmental catastrophe is nothing new. Waste and the Wasters studies the late Middle Ages, when a convergent crisis of land contraction, soil depletion, climate change, pollution, and plague eclipsed Western Europe. In a culture lacking formal scientific methods, the task of explaining and coming to grips with what was happening fell to medieval poets. The poems they wrote used the terms “waste” or “wasters” to anchor trenchant critiques of people’s unsustainable relationships with the world around them and with each other. In this book, Eleanor Johnson shows how poetry helped medieval people understand and navigate the ecosystemic crises—both material and spiritual—of their time.

Bill and Kelly Owen, two brothers who came up in the hardscrabble country of San Saba County, Texas, during the 1920s and 1930s, built one of the most successful cattle and sheep operations in the state, despite the devastating drought of the 1950s. Along the way, they figured out how to help not only themselves, but others in their home town. This brief biography by their daughters, Martha Owen Burnham and Eleanor Owen Johnson, tells their inspiring story of hard work, fair trading, creativity, and determination.

Eleanor Johnson is a poet, scholar, translator, and teacher. She studies medieval poetics, ethics, and literary theories. She has taught literature and creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley, and is an Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She has published poetry in the online magazine Shampoo and has a forthcoming collaborative book entitled "Her Many Feathered Bones," from Achiote Press.