Marco Formisano is Professor of Latin literature at Ghent University, and has been teaching an MA course specifically on ecocritical approaches to late Latin literature.

Late Latin Ecopoetics: journey, displacement, interruption.

In this course we explore a number of late Latin poetic texts, written between the late 4th and 6th centuries, through an ecocritical lens. Our corpus consists of Ausonius’ Mosella, Claudianus’ De raptu Proserpinae and Rutilius Namatianus’ De reditu suo, as well as a selection of poems by Claudianus, Venantius Fortunatus and Ennodius.

Most of these poems share themes of journey and displacement, and at the same time they display a sense of disruption within and through the environment. Rivers, mountains and valleys, lakes and sea, forests and trees, stones, debris and other non- or more-than-human elements are depicted as strong actors within a world in constant transformation.

The world of late antiquity does not necessarily need to be seen as an age wholly dependent on the past, but as a cultural phase which, following new religious and political constellations, radically re-interprets the relationships between humans and their environment.